Godzilla Without Godzilla

AppleTV+’s new series and winner of the year’s most inelegant title prize calls itself Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. It’s as if the iPhone design team has chosen every word: Monarch is the government organization tracking Godzilla and other kaiju in the recent and future big-screen movies like Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong. This show is the origin story of that organization. (And, yes, it’s confusing, but this show has nothing to do with the current Godzilla Minus One movie that is getting raves in movie theaters.)

“Legacy” is a word that the show takes very seriously to its detriment. This is a show that jumps back and forth in time from the 1950s to the mid 2010s, tying together the scientists who first tracked monsters inside the Earth down to their children and grandchildren. And boy do those grandkids have issues.

Lastly, “Monsters” is what viewers will get in very small doses, at least once per episode, in the 10-episode run of series. So far, Godzilla has popped up multiple times in flashbacks, but we’ve also seen other so-called “Titans” including Mantleclaw, Mother Longlegs, and the Frost Vark, an ice creature that sucks warmth out of a room faster than Ricky Gervais when he hosted the Golden Globes. The monsters don’t get the same amount of screen time or destructive playgrounds that the movies give them, but that’s by design.

Because Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is not really a monster show, in as much as Agents of S.H.I.E.L.D. wasn’t strictly a superhero show and The Larry Sanders Show was not an actual late-night talk show. Instead, Monarch tries to thread the needle as a gap-filler that takes place between the events of the first Hollywood Godzilla movie and Godzilla vs. Kong. It focuses on some of the people most affected by the disasters caused by the biggie creatures and how the aftermath has traumatized everyone, particularly the children of a scientist played by Takehiro Hira.

With its budget of Apple money, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters looks fantastic. The monster scenes have great digital effects, the globe-trotting scenery takes viewers from a destroyed San Francisco to Alaska to Tokyo and many other locales. And the cast is capable, particularly Kurt and Wyatt Russell, who both play Lt. Lee Shaw, an Army man who helps create Monarch, about 65 years apart. (The show alludes to the age problem: apparently, the right kind of radiation makes you live longer and still look as good as Kurt Russell at 90? Maybe?)

The problem with Monarch is that while the premise is intriguing and the behind-the-scenes talent is impressive (comics writer Matt Fraction is a co-creator), the story so far is moving like giant-monster-sized molasses and features main characters who are largely whiny, humorless, or humorlessly whiny.

While flashback scenes featuring Anders Holm, the younger Russell and Mari Yamamoto in a kind of Indiana Jones love/friendship triangle, chasing creatures in the jungle, crackles with verve and fun, the bits set in the 2010s with Ren Watabe, Kirsey Clemons and Anna Sawai are an absolute drag. These boring-ass millennials complain about everything, constantly, sniping at each other about their emotions and daddy issues, and mope about while the world is falling apart around them. They’re not the Walking Dead, they’re the Walking and Talking and Talking Some More and Why Won’t They Stop Talking For Fuck’s Sake? Dead.

Joe Tippett is fun to watch as a Gen X Monarch bureaucrat who’s trying to be sneaky and failing miserably, but the show also saddles him with Shadowy Organization With Big Secrets tropes we’ve seeing a million times on shows that moved more quickly and didn’t dither for half a season on traveling the world trying to get back a bunch of computer files. If that’s a stealth advertisement for iCloud, it’s not working.

With half a season of episodes left to air, Monarch could still redeem itself. The Russells, in particular, give the show just enough charm to coast a little bit longer. But for a monster show that’s not really a monster show, Monarch doesn’t need to have such a stately pace and such a funereal tone. The show’s telling the story of Godzilla from the point of view of a traumatized society that has perhaps responded in wrong ways. That’s all good and fine, but a prestige-style monster drama that looks this fantastic shouldn’t feel so skippable, as if you should watch it at 1.5x speed.

Pick up the pace; Godzilla’s got places to be and things to knock down.