Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Review: Apple Remembers the Titans

comingsoon.net:

Godzilla and Kong spinoff show hits Apple TV Plus with a double dose of Russell and monsters galore. But does it have a stronger bite than its big-screen brothers?

Kurt Russell and Godzilla in a TV show about giant monsters? With a far from modest budget for bringing those to life? And Wyatt Russell plays a younger version of his father’s character?

This alone meant I went into Monarch Legacy of Monsters excited for the fact so many personal boxes were being ticked, but this is Legendary’s MonsterVerse, an often surface-level examination of the great Toho Kaiju movies of past and present. With more time on the impact of monsters on humanity and on building human characters who you actually remember five seconds after you see them, Monarch Legacy of Monsters has a better chance to add something to the MonsterVerse, and perhaps retroactively put a little more meat on the movies’ monster bones.

Framing the series as a decades-long conspiracy to keep monsters hidden from the public until Godzilla’s 2014 rampage against the Mutos is one way to do it. The series quickly establishes its connections to the movies, with John Goodman returning to do a cameo of his Kong: Skull Island character, Bill Randa, as he encounters a previously unseen Titan on the island. Randa does appear again, but in his youth, portrayed by Anders Holm. There’s a lot of that.

It’s one of two quick bites of monster action to settle us into the more character-driven story. There’s a lot of time-jumping, but two key timelines matter. The years leading up to Monarch’s creation and those in the aftermath of the 2014 attacks. Following the thunderous battle between Godzilla and the Titans that leveled San Francisco and the shocking revelation that monsters