Monarch: Legacy of Monsters takes a Watchmen approach to lore

The MonsterVerse of our time

• by
  
  Joshua Rivera
  

• on November 18, 2023 at 1:00 pm

The rise of franchise-first pop culture has made what was once a stumbling block into everyone’s problem: exposition. Specifically, things we call “traditions.” When every big show or movie is connected to something else, those connections aren’t always great. Especially when you need to work on how your villain was in the Amazon with your mother when she was looking for spiders right before she died.

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, This absolutely gorgeous Apple TV Plus mystery thriller based on the MonsterVerse from Legendary Pictures deftly dances around every major predicament that modern mega-franchises happily delve into. The series frames itself with wonderful little details that unobtrusively build up the world of the show without the characters having to explain much of anything. It’s thoughtful in its visual design in a way that’s reminiscent of HBO movies The guardsanother show filled with extensive references to previous work, and carefully constructs a self-contained story.

The similarity is more than superficial. Both shows are very interested in building the backdrop of a political and cultural apparatus built around a huge and disparate event in history. Obviously, both shows had the writers flesh out a lot of the ways their fictional worlds were similar and the ways they diverged, and instead of having the characters recite endless facts that are best served through a wiki, they just depict the characters living in that world. It is for the viewer to notice the ways in which he is different.

Image: Apple TV Plus

Early episodes of monarch Full of details like this. Passengers on a commercial flight are sprayed by men in hazmat suits after an international flight, airline aisles have clearly marked Godzilla evacuation routes, and military weapons facilities prepare for the emergence of another Titan.

This, coupled with the series’ noteworthy focus on the human drama revolving around two brothers kept apart by their father. monarch The thematic richness surprises and delights. If the big, motley MonsterVerse movies use their kaiju as a symbol of humanity’s widespread disregard for the planet, then monarch Personalize this devastation. Not only by showing what it means to try to commit to normalcy after surviving a stunning disaster, but by showing how the men and women who have hunted these monsters for generations have broken their families to continue their reckless work – work that will in turn destroy the planet. .

monarch Less frank about thorny and difficult topics than The guards He was. You won’t find, for example, provocative explorations of race in America. But that doesn’t mean it’s not a show in these times. Very similar The guards I found new significance in revisiting a comic book from 1986, monarch He finds depths to delve into the random world of cinema that was jury-rigged around Gareth Edwards’ 2014 film. Godzilla remake. In it, we can see an examination of humanity’s struggles to navigate through mass catastrophe, an informal reflection of our inability to solve major crises without militarism, and the way institutions distort the fear of collapse into an excuse to control more of our lives. The story may be set in 2015, but few series look closer to 2023.

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