Can Monarch: Legacy of Monsters Finally Make Us Care About Godzilla’s Human Characters?
The MonsterVerse has always aimed for big and bold with its appearances in popular culture, which makes the relative quiet around Apple TV+’s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters pretty intriguing.
Godzilla vs. Kong came to movie screens with all the blockbuster bombast we’ve come to expect from Hollywood adaptations of foreign properties. And while its pandemic-era launch partially succumbed to the COVID virus in terms of box-office draw, fans of the beasties in both their classic and modern incarnations loved that the goofiness was dialed up to make way for what they really wanted — a giant monkey socking a giant lizard in the face.
What can I say? I’m easy to please.
Though we might be suckers for kaiju sucker-punches, the Godzilla films have a certain chintzy prestige that fans from the 1950s onwards carry with them as fond memories. Many classic monster movies, whether of Toho or Hollywood lineage, legitimately have something to say, with Godzilla the enormous, raging embodiment of man’s scientific-military-industrial recklessness with the environment and his unleashing of forces beyond our control. Blending post-Hiroshima nuclear dread, the psychological scars of Japan’s devastating 2011 tsunami and the wanton dumping of radioactive waste into his emergence from the sea, the King of the Monsters becomes the destructive penance mankind must pay for its negligence in caring for planet earth. And this message can’t be made without human characters.
