After a few lean years, things seem healthy once again in the world of the Godzilla franchise, with the American end of it making profitable, crowd-pleasing popcorn movies (the next of these, Godzilla x Kong: the New Empire, will be along shortly), while the big reptile’s Japanese progenitors recently came out with a movie so good it was talked about as a potential Oscar nominee. The grim days of Matthew Broderick and that dreary animated trilogy that turned up on Netflix seem long ago and far away.
So it is not entirely surprising that Legendary, custodians of the US side of the franchise, have been looking for new worlds to conquer, and settled on the thrilling possibilities presented by a streaming exclusive. The result is Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, which recently turned up on a lower profile but high quality service named after a fruit and a mathematical function.
(This, of course, is far from being the first outing for Godzilla on the small screen – he popped up in various episodes of Ultraman on Japanese TV, while my own first exposure to the character was from the 1970s Hanna-Barbera cartoon which introduced Godzookey to the world (gee, thanks for that). The 1990s cartoon was a step up and there was a genuinely interesting Japanese animated series which showed up on Netflix a few years ago, which coupled some absolutely lovely artwork with an arrestingly trippy plot.)
The title is a bit of a giveaway, as the new show concerns Monarch, the monster-hunting agency which was the connective tissue of the first few movies of the recent American series. It gets underway with a sort-of flashback to Kong: Skull Island (i.e. it’s something which occurs during that film which we didn’t actually see at the time) with John Goodman running away from one of those giant bamboo spiders.
This is really the extent of Goodman’s participation, alas, but it turns out that his character Bill Randa was one of the founders of Monarch back in the 1950s, and his adopted son Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira) followed him into the biz. But, not long after Godzilla’s battle with the MUTOs in San Francisco in 2014, Hiroshi goes missing in slightly mysterious circumstances and is presumed dead. His daughter Cate (Anna Sawai) flies into Tokyo to put his affairs in order, but it turns out the operative word is not really ‘affairs’ but ‘bigamy’ – as he had wives and children on both sides of the Pacific.
Cate and her half-brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe) go through their father’s effects and find some old records which Grandpa Bill bequeathed to him – and, of course, Monarch itself would really like to get these back. But is Hiroshi really dead? The trail of clues leads them to a maximum security old people’s home which turns out to be the current residence of Bill Randa’s old friend and colleague Colonel Lee Shaw (Kurt Russell).
One of the hooks of the show, which may make it slightly tricky to follow but also adds considerably to its appeal, is that there are multiple storylines running in parallel throughout, the main one being the adventures of Cate, Kentaro, and their friends in 2015 as they hunt for Hiroshi and try to keep Monarch at bay. Interwoven with this is the story of the origins of the organisation sixty years earlier – this part focuses on a youthful Bill (Anders Holm) and his partner Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), along with their military liaison Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell).
Casting Kurt and Wyatt Russell as the same character at different ages is possibly a slightly gimmicky idea, but it actually works rather well; they’re not both in every episode but it’s not as if you find your attention-level flatlining when one of them skips a week. Truth be told, the period sections of Legacy of Monsters are the best bits, sort of like a more historical version of The X Files with added kaiju – the kids in the more present-day-based episodes aren’t especially interesting characters and there are problems with their bit of the plot.
On the other hand, I may be biased, as the period bits of the story are rather more interesting – the show isn’t shy about making a fair amount of use of Godzilla himself, and this is mostly where he shows up, usually in expanded flashbacks to the Gareth Edwards movie. Then again, there’s a terrific 2015 sequence in which he manages to appear out of nowhere in North Africa, duly shocking everyone in the vicinity. The show also has a go at introducing a few new monsters, but they are bush-league types with silly names – you will wait in vain for any sign of one of the classic Toho stable.
The significant flaw in Legacy of Monsters, though, is that the main plot eventually turns out to be lower in stakes and less monster-centric than it initially seems to be. It’s heavily suggested early on that a major monster-related event is on the cards, no doubt involving the big G in one of his moods – but this never actually materialises, with the final episodes revolving around characters wandering about the hollow earth (which almost seems to have turned into Magical Plot Device Country) – there’s a bit of personal jeopardy, but nothing especially spectacular about how it all resolves. There’s a sense of anticlimax that not even a cameo from Skull Island’s most famous resident can shift.
Still, there’s a fair amount of good stuff along the way, particularly from Russell pere et fils, and the monster action, when it comes, has clearly had money and talent lavished upon it. If they go for a second season I’d suggest dumping most of the 2015 characters and just focussing on the idea of the secret history of monsters (ideally with Mothra in it, but that’s just me), as this is where is shines. Even at its worst, though, it only feels earnest and uninspired rather than actually bad. This has a good claim to being the best Godzilla-related TV series to date.
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