With new monster ‘Titan X’ on the loose, government agency Monarch is back on the hunt.
Streaming on: Apple TV
Episodes viewed: 6 of 10
“So, here be monsters,” quips young Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) during this return season’s first episode. “If we’re lucky…” replies his buddy, cryptozoologist Bill Randa (Anders Holm). This little exchange kinda sums up Monarch: Legacy Of Monsters. It’s pretty fun, but it’s hardly sparkling repartee, entirely representative of the MonsterVerse show’s ‘that’ll do’ scripting. And it suggests that its characters — the human beings we’re encouraged to care about in this alternative world of sky-scraping behemoths — really need those ‘Titans’ around to mean anything to us.
This second bout of massive-creature/tiny-fragile-people juggling maintains the format of the first. We hop between the 1950s early-Monarch antics of Shaw, Randa plus their shared love interest Dr Keiko Miura (Mari Yamamoto) and the post-Godzilla-attack 2010s, where the offspring and grandchildren of Randa and Miura spend an inordinate amount of time squabbling in front of big screens in blue-tinged control rooms, and predictably dealing with shady corporate types. Except now Keiko prominently features in both eras, having skipped 60-odd years in the time-dilating monster-realm of Axis Mundi, leading to some Captain America-esque displacement (though, frankly, not enough — she finds it absurdly easy to adjust, despite now being younger than her son, played by Takehiro Hira).
When focused on those crypto-creatures, Monarch is entertaining enough.
Season 2 has also not stinted on the production values that marked out the first, with an apparently globe-trotting, location-heavy shoot and a menagerie of freaky beasties conjured by acceptable CGI, from little nasty pointy things to gargantuan building-fisters. Notably short on screentime during these first six episodes is the Big G himself, while grumpy arse-scratcher Kong only has a few cameos. Instead, the emphasis is on new kaiju ‘Titan X’, which is accidentally unleashed from Axis Mundi by Cate Randa (Anna Sawai), giving her a tiresome guilt complex to stack on top of her Season 1 PTSD, as well as a strange connection to the monster. This many-tentacled horny fish-dragon comes encrusted with little ‘scarabs’, which scamper around like giant toothy ticks, causing no end of additional bother to the key character group, which loses a few significant members along the way. Monster-hunting’s a pretty deadly business, you know.
While neither Russell Jr nor Sr is ever unwelcome on our screen (and we still dig the whole Wyatt/Kurt character-sharing coup), it’s really hard to care about any of them, or their overstretched non-Titan-related problems — a bit of bigamy, some yawny daddy/mommy issues, and a shrug of a love triangle. Still, when focused on those crypto-creatures, Monarch is entertaining enough, and at least remains a cut above much of the movie MonsterVerse.
The fleshing out of the MonsterVerse continues to fail to make most of its human characters interesting, but scrapes by on the outsize thrills of its Titanic action.
