Monarch: Legacy of Monsters (2024) TV Drinking Game & Review

Take a Drink: each time Godzilla shows up.

Do NOT Take a Shot: whenever there’s a flashback or a time jump forwards or backwards in the story.

Do a Shot: whenever something secretive is revealed about the past of one of the central characters.

Finish Your Drink: whenever there’s a direct connection to the 2014 Godzilla film.

Fun fact: Godzilla has been around for over half of the entire history of the artform of film. Seventy years ago, the very first Japanese Godzilla film premiered, and seventy years before that, the film industry simply did not exist. Therefore, along with James Bond (which is currently on hiatus at the time of this review being written), Godzilla is the longest running film series yet, beating 007 by almost an entire decade. While not every film in the franchise is directly connected to one another, the giant atomic lizard has only ever existed on screen (at first, anyway), unlike other widely portrayed fictional characters that were born on the page, such as Sherlock Holmes, Tarzan, etc.

For as long as ‘zilla has been around, he’s also been imported overseas for American viewers to enjoy as well. While this mainly consisted of the Japanese films being recut and partially reshot for their American releases (almost always to the detriment of the film itself), it wasn’t until 1998 that an American studio tried their hand at making their own Godzilla flick. The resulting 1998 film, distributed by Sony Pictures and directed by Independence Day helmer Roland Emmerich, turned out to be so widely reviled that it kept the big lizard on ice for years to come. In an era where people will reclaim any previously hated movie that they’re nostalgic for, from the 2003 Mike Myers stinker The Cat in the Hat to the famously hated Star Wars prequels, the fact that the 1998 Godzilla hasn’t been the recipient of such a cultural re-examination just speaks to its lack of broader appeal.

Godzilla’s cultural hibernation lasted until a full decade ago, back in 2014. This saw the world premiere of Gareth Edwards’ American reboot of Godzilla, which was the first in an attempted shared universe with several other classic screen monsters, which would eventually lead to King Kong, whose presence in this shared universe also inevitably led to a rematch between the two titans in 2021. While other attempts at cinematic universes in the vein of Marvel have risen and fallen in the years to come, such as Universal’s now infamous Dark Universe and Marvel’s own rival DC, Legendary’s self titled “MonsterVerse” is one of the paltry few to withstand the downfall of this trend and was able to survive for so long by playing it smart and not oversaturating the market, instead releasing things in a patient, steady manner. Over the course of ten years, the Monster Verse has only released four movies, with a fifth on the way, and one television series, which is the subject of this writeup – the Apple TV original streaming series, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters.

The main plot of this series tells two concurrently running timelines with overlapping characters. The main plot of the show concerns the immediate aftermath of the 2014 Godzilla, and follows a woman named Cate Randa – played by Anna Sawai, who also has a prominent role in the currently airing Shogun series on FX – as she goes down a path of uncovering her own family history, which leads her directly into the crosshairs of the titular monster prevention agency, and more specifically to one of its founders, the long retired Colonel Lee Shaw. The secondary storyline follows Colonel Shaw as a much younger man in events which depict the founding of Monarch and the discovery of giant monsters in our world.

One thing immediately separates Monarch from its peers is the depth and detail of its storytelling and characterizations. Of course the format of an entire season worth of television versus a single two hour long movie which splits its focus equally between the humans and the monsters means the amount of time that can be devoted to fleshing out the world and the main storyline, as well as adding dimension and layers to the human cast, is all given considerably more time to breathe and find itself throughout its ten episode length. Along with the writing, all of the actors involved do a fine job at adding humanity to their roles, with the standout casting decision of the series being father and son acting duo Kurt and Wyatt Russell both playing Lee Shaw at different points in his life during the two parallel plotlines of the series.

But for all of Monarch‘s layered storytelling and characterizations, the main draw here and indeed its entire reason for existing are the monsters (or “titans” as they’re referred to throughout), particularly Godzilla himself. But while our big wet beefy boy does make a handful of appearances scattered throughout the series (he shows up in about half of the show’s ten episodes), he is not the only monster to make an appearance during this run of the show. Fortunately, the effects work that seeks to bring these larger than life creations to, well, life here is first rate – just as good, if not better than the effects of the four prior Monster Verse films. This is surely due in part to the spare usage of the monsters themselves (less screen time to animate of course means more time to work on the times the monsters do actually show up), and results in some of the most polished and professional-looking effects work on display. In an era for streaming original material where content is churned out so quickly and with so little turnover time that the effects work often suffers for it and is noticeably lacking in the finished product, the strengths of the effects work in Monarch: Legacy of Monsters cannot be praised enough.

In case it wasn’t already clear by this point, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a great series and a terrific achievement of modern longform pulp genre storytelling. It contains far better production values and more rewarding storytelling than the bulk of streaming original content out there, and is a massive improvement when compared to anything else of the Kaiju variety produced by English language studios since the resurgence of Godzilla’s popularity in western popular culture. It serves not only as a bookend to the currently running MonsterVerse, but is just as much (if not more) of a well rounded and satisfying experience than anything it’s connected to. The amount of depth and detail of its characterizations and storytelling is unmatched in American monster movie fare, and therefore solidifies this series as the best piece of Godzilla-related media to ever be produced in the United States – or at least since the Blue Öyster Cult’s hit single named after the atomic fire breathing big guy.