The rise of franchise-first pop culture has eliminated what used to be a genre stumbling block for everyone’s problem: Exposition. In particular, the things we call ‘lore’. When every major show or movie has to be connected to something else, those connections aren’t always graceful. Especially when you have to investigate how your villain was in the Amazon with your mother while she was researching spiders right before she died.
Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, Apple TV Plus’ extremely good mystery thriller, based on Legendary Pictures’ MonsterVerse, deftly dances around every major pitfall that modern mega-franchises gleefully fall into. The series contains fascinating little details that unobtrusively expand the world of the show without requiring characters to explain much of anything. It is thoughtful in its visual design in a way reminiscent of HBO’s Watchmenonce again an exhibition full of extensive references to previous work, carefully building a story that stands on its own.
The similarity is more than superficial. Both shows are deeply interested in the background construction of a political and cultural apparatus based on one large, disparate event in history. On both shows, writers clearly did a lot of mapping in the ways their fictional worlds were similar and in the ways they diverged. Instead of having characters recite endless facts that would be better served by a wiki, they merely reflect the characters living in their lives. that world. It’s up to the viewer to notice the ways it’s different.
Image: Apple TV Plus
The first episodes of Monarch are filled with details like this. Passengers on a commercial flight are gunned down by men in hazmat suits after an international trip, airline corridors have clearly marked Godzilla’s evacuation routes, and installations of military weaponry are ready for another Titan appearance.
This, coupled with the show’s remarkable focus on human drama about two siblings whose father kept them away from each other, gives Monarch a thematic richness that surprises and delights. If the big, cacophonous MonsterVerse movies use their kaiju as a metaphor for humanity’s disregard for the planet on a grand scale, then Monarch personalizes that devastation. Not only by showing what it’s like to try to find normality after surviving a spectacular catastrophe, but by showing how the men and women who have hunted these monsters for generations have shattered their families for their reckless to continue work – work that would in turn destroy the planet. .
Monarch is less open about thorny, difficult topics than Watchmen used to be. In America, for example, you won’t find provocative explorations of race. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show for our times. Like Watchmen found new relevance in the revision of a 1986 comic book, Monarch finds depths to plumb in the haphazard cinematic universe the jury constructed around Gareth Edwards’ 2014 Godzilla remake. In it we can see a reflection on humanity’s struggle to confront a collective disaster, a casual reflection on our inability to solve major crises without militarism, and the way institutions twist the fear of collapse into an excuse to gain more control over our lives. The story may be set in 2015, but few genre shows feel more 2023.