Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Fixes a Common Problem in Godzilla Movies
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters fixes a common problem in Godzilla movies, specifically the problem with human characters. In Godzilla movies, there rarely is enough time to make the audience care about the human characters. The only reason they’re usually there is to fill time between scenes of monsters leveling cities. Most of them get to scream, be stepped on, or say nonsense technobabble that nobody cares about. The audience paid to see monsters, not people.
The difference with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is that it’s a series, so it has time to flesh out the characters. They are the main focus. It’s not a show about Godzilla. It’s a show about the people who live in Godzilla’s universe and how they get wrapped up in a mystery surrounding Monarch, the secret organization created in the 40s to hunt and study the MUTO (massive unidentified terrestrial organisms). There are giant monsters, but they’ve been used sparingly so far in the first 3 episodes available exclusively on Apple TV.
The show gets to take time to explore the human impact of these giant monsters in ways the movies usually skip over. One character in the series, Cate (Anna Sawai) was on the San Francisco bridge that Godzilla walked through in the Godzilla movie from 2014. We see her flashback to a shocking and tragic incident on the bridge as well as the traumatizing effect it had on her, all while she’s trying to process a surprising connection to another character discovered while trying to find her missing father.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters has a similar vibe to LOST in a lot of ways, particularly through mysterious happenings on strange islands and time jumps that tell the story from the past and the present, with Wyatt and Kurt Russell playing the same character in two different time periods — one from the 1950s and another from 2015, just after the events of the 2014 movie. This approach, combined with likable actors played by good actors, gives the writers enough to work with to keep the show interesting without having a MUTO show up every 5 minutes. When the MUTOs do show up, the impact is even greater because the writers are taking time to develop the characters.
If you want a show with 60 minutes of people screaming as giant monsters duke it out in Tokyo, then Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is probably not for you. But if you’re a fan of character development and want to explore some human drama in the MonsterVerse with characters who also get to do their fair share of screaming, then this show should definitely be on your must-watch list.
No responses yet