Thoughts on MONARCH: LEGACY OF MONSTERS, Part 1 (Spoilers)

My long-running kaiju review series continues with Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the first live-action TV series in Legendary’s MonsterVerse, focusing on the kaiju-investigating organization that’s tied the franchise together (at least in live action, since it played no role in at least the first season of the Skull Island animated series). Chris Black (Sliders, Star Trek: Enterprise) is the showrunner, with noted comic book writers Matt Fraction and Mariko Tamaki on the writing staff. WandaVision’s executive producer/director Matt Shakman fills the former role here and the latter in the first two episodes. It’s a ten-episode season, which I’ll cover in two posts.

The series streams on Apple TV+, which has a weird quirk where the English subtitles for foreign dialogue don’t consistently appear unless you have the overall captioning turned on for all dialogue. That’s very necessary in this show, quite a lot of whose dialogue is in Japanese, and occasionally other languages. Once I realized the problem late in episode 1, I had to go back, turn on the subtitles, and rewatch parts of it to catch the dialogue I missed. (When I went to subscribe, by the way, I found I already had an Apple account that I couldn’t remember ever registering for. My best guess is that it’s an old QuickTime media-player account from several computers ago. I’m surprised it was still active.)

The series is a period piece woven between the events of the movies. The premiere episode “Aftermath” opens with John Goodman reprising his movie role of Bill Randa, supposedly during the 1973 events of Kong: Skull Island, though I’m unsure where it could fit in that film, and Goodman is visibly older (which reportedly made him hesitant about appearing). The scene features a giant crab called a Mantleclaw that conceals itself in a hole in the beach, very similar to the Trapdoor Crabs of the Skull Island series. Randa flings a sealed bag of recordings into the ocean to be found later, similarly to the catalyzing plot device of the comic Skull Island: The Birth of Kong.

In 2015, a year after Godzilla’s battle with the MUTOs in San Francisco (known as “G-Day”), Bill’s Japanese-American granddaughter Cate Randa (Anna Sawai) goes to Tokyo after the presumed death of her father Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira) to investigate an apartment he owned there without her knowledge. She’s startled to find it occupied by Kentaro Randa (Ren Watabe), the half-brother she never knew, and his mother Emiko (Qyoko Kudo), who are equally surprised to learn Hiroshi had another wife and child.

(Kentaro’s apartment doesn’t look at all like the dwellings I’ve seen in Japanese TV — it has a wooden front door opening onto an interior hallway rather than a metal door opening on an exterior walkway, and it’s absurdly big for a single-family dwelling in densely populated Tokyo. Reportedly the show filmed in Tokyo for two weeks, but I’m guessing the apartment was a studio set in Vancouver.)

Cate is happy to write off her bigamist father’s other family, but she’s forced together with Kentaro and Emiko during a Godzilla sheltering drill, our first look at how the world has changed in the wake of G-Day. Cate’s PTSD flashback reveals that she was a schoolteacher on one of the evacuation buses on the Golden Gate Bridge when Godzilla smashed through it. Unlike the one featured in the movie, this one fell into the bay with most of her students before she could get them out.

(The flashback gives me a second chance to be annoyed at how Godzilla tears through both support cables yet the bridge deck miraculously remains level and rigid. Why do Hollywood filmmakers never understand how a suspension bridge works? Break the main cables and the entire deck collapses, because it’s suspended from them, like the name says. Then again, it was smashed through by a 355-foot-high radioactive dinosaur that somehow isn’t crushed by his own weight on land, and turns out there’s an extradimensional realm inside the Hollow Earth, so whatever.)

Kentaro takes Cate to Hiroshi’s Tokyo office, where they discover a safe containing the Monarch bag from the teaser. Kentaro takes it to his ex, a hacker and old-media buff going by May Olowe-Hewitt (Kiersey Clemons), who’s able to play the 1970s data discs within, revealing Monarch files, the Randa half-siblings’ first inkling that their father had an even more secret life beyond his bigamy. May’s use of an online decryption algorithm sends up a flag at Monarch HQ, which an employee named Tim (Joe Tippett) decides to investigate without alerting his boss.

Interspersed with all this are scenes in 1959, where we meet the young “Billy” Randa (Anders Holm, who bears only faint resemblance to John Goodman at that age), his wife Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), and their military partner Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell). They’re a Monarch team investigating a monster nest in a Kazakhstan nuclear reactor, inside which Keiko is dragged into a deep hole by a horde of giant insects, known officially as Endoswarmers.

Episode 2, “Departure,” flashes back to 1952, where U.S. Army Lieutentant Lee Shaw is assigned to escort Dr. Keiko Miura on an expedition into the Philippine jungle to study anomalous radiation readings. The bickering duo runs into Billy Randa, a cryptozoologist exploring folklore about a dragon leaving a trail of fire in the sky, or perhaps radiation. (Most sources of ionizing radiation don’t actually glow in the visible spectrum, but maybe he thinks it’s Cherenkov radiation). Keiko teams up with Billy over Shaw’s objection, and the scientists ditch the lieutenant and track the evidence to the site of Billy’s real quarry: the Lawton, the ship he was on when (as established in Kong: Skull Island) something attacked and sank it, with Billy the only survivor. Except now it’s sitting in the jungle with huge gashes in the side. Shaw returns in time to save them from a dragonlike kaiju—sorry, MUTO, as Billy calls them—known officially as an Ion Dragon.

Now, I’d been assuming Lee Shaw was the same Shaw introduced in the Godzilla: Awakening comic, but that Shaw was a Navy man whose first depicted kaiju/MUTO/Titan encounter was in 1946, while this Shaw is an Army lieutenant who explicitly never saw one until 1952. Evidently the comics are going the way of most supposedly “canonical” tie-ins, with new screen canon freely contradicting them, yet perhaps drawing on some of their elements in new ways.

In 2015 Tokyo, Cate is approached by Monarch guy Tim, who urges her to return Hiroshi’s files, politely but with enough veiled threat to spook her into running. She’s caught by Tim’s partner Duvall (Elisa Lasowski) and put in a car, but Cate’s panic attack causes it to crash. Cate escapes without her purse and passport, so she makes her way to May’s place, only to find Tim and Duvall have raided it already. But May’s the paranoid type who saw them coming, and she helps Cate get away.

They rendezvous with Kentaro, who’s not happy to see Cate but who’s fled his home (abetted by Emiko) following his own politely intimidating visit from Tim & Duvall. He’d discovered more files in Hiroshi’s office, including the retirement location of Colonel Lee Shaw, Hiroshi’s favorite “uncle” according to Emiko. They find Shaw there, now played by Wyatt Russell’s father Kurt Russell. (Who’s a couple of decades younger than Shaw should be in 2015, but this will be explained later.) Shaw is pleased to discover they’re Hiroshi’s kids, and reveals that the retirement community is actually a Monarch minimum-security prison. When he learns from Cate that Hiroshi’s plane supposedly vanished without a trace in Alaska, he invites the kids to join him in breaking out to find the truth.

In episode 3, “Secrets and Lies,” they escape and travel to Korea to meet an old friend of Shaw’s, while he explains that Monarch started out well-meaning but lost its way. Since May has Randa’s files digitized, Shaw convinces Kentaro to destroy the incriminating documents.

Back in 1954 (with a well-done dissolve from Kurt to Wyatt Russell’s face), Shaw and Keiko have joined Billy’s Monarch organization. (The show will reveal later that Billy founded it in the late ’40s but it didn’t amount to much until he recruited the other two, presumably why Serizawa claimed a 1954 founding date in the original movie.) The trio petitions Shaw’s superior, General Puckett (Christopher Heyerdahl), to supply uranium to attract the Titan that made the gigantic footprint they discovered in the Philippines. They’re surprised when it arrives in bomb form, and yes, we’ve reached the opening title montage of the 2014 movie, sooner than I expected. It turns out the movie’s footage of the attempt to blow up Godzilla with the Castle Bravo nuclear “test” was filmed by Bill Randa himself. (There’s a bit of historical imprecision, since the dialogue implies the bomb is uranium-based, when it was actually a hybrid fission-fusion bomb with a uranium-plutonium core.)

Keiko balks at killing a creature we don’t understand, and when Godzilla arrives (without his traditional theme music, unfortunately, or even a memorable substitute), Shaw stops her from sabotaging the trigger signal, not wanting her to get deported for treason. Believing Godzilla dead, Puckett gives Monarch unlimited funding to find other Titans (the term is already in use here, even though we never heard it in the films set in 1973 and 2014), but Shaw tells the scientists that they only need to tell him as much as they think he and Puckett need to know.

In 2015, Shaw’s old friend Du-Ho (Bruce Baek) flies the runaway group to Alaska in search of Hiroshi. Du-Ho gives Cate a nice pep talk about not running from loss—not a moment too soon, since Cate’s bitterness was starting to wear thin for me. Meanwhile, Monarch Deputy Director Natalia Verdugo (Mirelly Taylor, cool name) chews out Tim for his unsanctioned chase after Randa’s documents, but Duvall convinces her to give Tim a second chance.

May’s data helps Shaw figure out Hiroshi’s destination in the icy wastes, where they find a wrecked plane containing its pilot’s body. In Hiroshi’s camp nearby, the Randas find the pencil shavings that the previous episode established as a characteristic quirk of Hiroshi’s, proving he survived. Du-Ho realizes the plane landed safely and was wrecked afterward, just before a mole-like Titan called a Frost Vark bursts out of the ground and destroys Du-Ho’s plane with him inside.

Episode 4: “Parallels and Interiors” is the first without any 1950s flashbacks. Shaw, the Randas, and May flee from the Frost Vark, and May’s legs get soaked while they hide in a cave, so she’s at risk of frostbite as darkness falls. Kentaro leads them toward a structure he’s convinced he saw from the plane, until the others decide to make for a mysterious light they spot in another direction, whereupon Kentaro stubbornly goes off on his own. Flashbacks to 2014 show how Kentaro and May happened to meet and hit it off while he was avoiding his own art-show premiere because he felt Hiroshi pushed him into it before he was ready. This haunts him because it was the last time he saw Hiroshi before his disappearance.

Meanwhile, a Monarch scientist named Barnes (Jess Salgueiro) has picked up a pulsar-like radiation surge from underground in Alaska, which is the light the stranded group is following. Verdugo is concerned to learn it’s the same radiation signature that preceded the 2014 MUTO outbreaks.

The mystery light leads the other three back to Hiroshi’s camp, and when the Frost Vark attacks and sucks up their campfire from underground, Shaw finally realizes what was obvious to me at the top of the episode: it’s seeking heat. He plans to light a “funeral pyre” for Du-Ho as a trap, but it attacks before he’s ready. Fortunately, Kentaro has found an abandoned radio shack and called in a rescue chopper. They escape, and Kentaro tells Cate he found more pencil shavings, again confirming Hiroshi’s survival. But they’re not happy when the chopper lands and they’re greeted by Tim and Duvall.

In episode 5: “The Way Out,” we start to see what moviegoers already knew, that Monarch isn’t evil; there are just differences of opinion about how it should operate. Tim apologizes to his colleagues for spooking Cate, but still feels the Randa kids should be brought into Monarch as their family legacy. Verdugo agrees with Duvall to cut them loose and watch where they go; meanwhile, Duvall offers May a separate, secret deal to be her informant. But Verdugo holds onto Shaw, who insists to her that Monarch needs to stop being passive about the Titan threat.

The Randas and May reach San Francisco, and we get a good look at its status after the mass destruction it suffered—something we aren’t often shown in kaiju stories. Cate’s mother Caroline Randa (the always welcome Tamlyn Tomita) works with FEMA to reclaim the belongings of evacuated San Franciscans. On meeting Kentaro, she admits to Cate that she suspected Hiroshi was unfaithful, and had an ulterior motive in pushing Cate to go to Tokyo to find out what she was too afraid to find for herself.

Caroline smuggles the trio into the ruined city to investigate Hiroshi’s office there, though she warns they’ll be shot as looters if they’re found. As they dodge the Army in the post-Godzillalyptic cityscape, Cate and Kentaro finally begin to bond over memories of Hiroshi. It’s Cate’s turn for flashbacks: shortly before G-Day, her girlfriend Dani (Courtney Dietz) persuaded her to move in, which spooked Cate into drawing back and taking after her father by cheating on Dani with another woman. Cate chose to board the fatal school bus rather than stay with Dani, though it isn’t established whether Dani died. I guess Cate has enough trauma even without that.

Hiroshi’s office is in the Transamerica Pyramid, since heaven forbid a fictional character in a certain city work anywhere except its single most iconic building. They do a bit of Raiders of the Lost Ark business with the light of the conveniently rising Sun to deduce that the big “satellite” map on his wall is actually a track of kaiju movements on Earth, which tells them Hiroshi’s next destination is in the Northern Sahara. They emerge with a renewed sense of purpose, while May calls Duvall to accept the deal.

–

I’ll cover the rest of the season in my next post, but for now, some general observations.

The cast is fairly good overall, though Anders Holm pales in comparison to John Goodman’s presence and charisma. I found Cate too bitter and abrasive in the early episodes, but that’s a writing issue, and Anna Sawai does a good job with what she’s given (though I admit I might have been less patient with Cate if I didn’t find Sawai stunningly beautiful). Mari Yamamoto is appealing and soulful as Keiko, the emotional anchor of much of the series. The two Russells do a reasonably good job playing the same man decades apart, though Wyatt doesn’t really look that much like Kurt did at that age.

Another standout for me is Qyoko Kudo, who gives a charming performance as Emiko. I find it interesting that Emiko (who speaks almost exclusively in Japanese) tends to preface her sentences to Kentaro with the particle “Ne,” an informal usage generally associated with teenage girls dishing to each other—an interesting and endearing choice for a mature mother talking to her somber, angry adult son.

Mainly I’m just glad to see an American Godzilla production centered so heavily on Japanese and Japanese-American characters. It makes it feel closer to the source. I’ve talked before about the bad habit of the MonsterVerse movies to center on white male leads who are usually less interesting or appealing than the more diverse characters around them, as if they’re just tacked on out of a sense of obligation. It’s no surprise that a TV series is freer to cast diversely than Hollywood movies, since the feature industry is overcautious and decades behind the curve in such matters.

So much of the series is set in Japan and/or delivered in Japanese dialogue that it feels like a truly international collaboration, something made for both Godzilla audiences at once. Indeed, it’s one of the few North American productions I’ve seen where all the Japanese or Japanese-American characters are played by actors of actual Japanese nationality or descent. (The same pretty much goes for MonsterVerse movies, with one or two minor exceptions such as Terry Chen in the 2014 film.) The authenticity is appreciated.

To be continued…

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