[COLUMN] Monarch Explores Godzilla's Twin Heritages | by Darren Mooney| by Darren Mooney (Patreon)

Monarch: Legacy of Monsters is a show about symmetry. It is about doubling and mirroring, concepts separated across time and space intersecting on one central point.

This is reflected in any number of ways across the show, right down to the logo of the eponymous monster-hunting agency. It is an “M” (for “Monarch”), doubled across the horizontal axis to create the image of two triangles that cross over at the center. It’s a simple but effective image, and it speaks to the central preoccupations of Legacy of Monsters, the new Apple TV+ streaming series that serves as a spin-off to Warner Bros.’ “Monster-verse.”

Throughout the show, images and ideas are doubled. This metaphor is made very apparent during the opening credits, in which images are doubled through a fold in the center of the screen. Sometimes, objects are mirrored across time; modern technology contrasted with more analogy equivalents. Sometimes, the imagery seems separated by culture; American newspaper headlines are contrasted with coverage of the same events in Japan.

This symmetry is woven into the show’s narrative fabric. Structurally, Legacy of Monsters unfolds across two timelines, each built around a triptych of characters. In the wake of the Second World War, Keiko Mira (Mari Yamamoto) and Bill Randa (Anders Holm) work with Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell) to establish Monarch. Then, in the wake of the events of Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, Cate (Anna Sawai), Kentaro (Ren Watabe) and May (Kiersey Clemons) become embroiled in their own mystery.

If these two unfolding plots have a point of overlap that ties past and future together, it is Lee Shaw himself. By the end of two-episode premiere, Cate, Kentaro and May have made contact with an older Lee Shaw (played by Kurt Russell), who is looking reasonably spry for a man who must be older than a century. Shaw has been a part of Monarch since the beginning, providing continuity between what was and what is.

However, the characters in Legacy of Monsters are not only split between past and future. They are also separated by the Pacific Ocean. Cate is introduced traveling from San Francisco to Tokyo following the death of her father, Hiroshi Randa. On “settling his affairs”, Cate discovered that Hiroshi owned an apartment in Japan. Dispatched by her mother to investigate, she is shocked to discover that her father had an entire other family. This is how she meets her half-brother, Kentaro.

Just as Shaw serves as the axis on which the show forms a temporal symmetry, Hiroshi serves a similar function for both Cate and Kentaro. These are two strangers separated by thousands of miles, but who share one crucial thing in common. It’s a clever hook for a weekly television show, establishing immediate and effective emotional stakes. It takes the scale and spectacle of the “G-Day” monster attack in Godzilla, and offers a human equivalent.

Indeed, Legacy of Monsters suggests that Hiroshi is perhaps comparable to Godzilla. The show takes place in the aftermath of a horrific and devastating tragedy that has left San Francisco in ruins, but the revelations about Hiroshi have had a similar impact on his own children. Everything that Cate and Kentaro thought that they knew about their father and about themselves has been revealed to be a lie, and they are scrambling through the emotional aftermath of that realization.

There is something quite interesting in building a Godzilla-centric series around the idea of one family divided across two continents. Like Hiroshi, Godzilla is a concept so large that it stands astride the Pacific Ocean like a colossus. Like Shaw, Godzilla has a murky (and occasionally convoluted) history that stretches back decades. As Cate and Kentaro dig into their own family history, Legacy of Monsters feels like an effort to reconcile two very different cultural understandings of Godzilla.

The monster is a Japanese creation, first appearing in Godzilla in 1954. That film was quickly reedited for American audiences, with an alternate cut released two years later under the title Godzilla, King of the Monsters! This version cut twenty minutes from the film to make the project “palatable both linguistically and politically for the American market.” It worked. The film was a massive success, and many subsequent kaiju films would be similarly reworked for American audiences.

Toho Studios sought to capitalize on this success with a trans-Pacific crossover. King Kong vs. Godzilla was the third film in the Godzilla franchise, following Godzilla Raids Again. It pit Godzilla against a uniquely American movie monster. Once again, this movie had a distinct American cut. While differences between the two versions are often exaggerated, the ending was changed. In the Japanese cut, both monsters roar at the end. In the American cut, only King Kong can be heard.

However, Hollywood would take decades to completely assimilate Godzilla. Producer Henry G. Saperstein claimed to have spent a decade trying to convince Toho to let an American studio take their shot at the monster. In October 1992, it was announced that TriStar Pictures had secured the rights to an American Godzilla movie. Crucially, Toho would be allowed to develop their own films in parallel with any American production, effectively branching the franchise.

Toho were very insistent about how the monster should be portrayed. “It was a painstaking process,” confessed producer Robert Fried, “they even sent me a four-page, single-spaced memo describing the physical requirements the Godzilla in our film had to have. They're very protective.” There is little indication that director Roland Emmerich was particularly concerned with respecting that memo. Emmerich’s Godzilla opened to terrible reviews and disappointing box office.

Many of the people involved with the Japanese franchise were unimpressed by Emmerich’s blockbuster. There was a concern that the adaptation did not understand what the monster meant. “It's not Godzilla,” argued actor Kenpachiro Satsuma, “it doesn't have his spirit.” Producer Shogo Tomiyama opined that “Hollywood’s Godzilla is just a normal monster. He's not a God. Hollywood treated Godzilla as a live monster or live animal. They shot him down with missiles and all that.”

While the underwhelming box office results killed any chance of a sequel, Emmerich’s Godzilla spun off into an animated series. Just over a decade later, Warner Bros. would take another shot at adaptation with Gareth Edwards’ Godzilla, which was intended as a launching pad to an entire “Monsterverse.” It spawned sequels and spin-offs including feature films Kong: Skull Island, Godzilla: King of the Monsters and Godzilla vs. Kong, not to mention the television show Monarch.

Throughout these projects, there is a recurring sense that American studios don’t entirely understand what Godzilla represents in Japanese culture. Edwards’ Godzilla comes closest, presenting the character as something approaching a metaphysical apocalypse. King of the Monsters suggests these creatures are perhaps a metaphor for climate change. Monarch leans surprisingly heavily into a retro war on terror metaphor in a way that recalls Rings of Power.

These various disjointed approaches to Godzilla lack the metaphorical clarity of contemporary Japanese takes on the monster, such as Hideaki Anno and Shinji Higuchi’s Shin Godzilla. However, whatever differences exist between them, both America and Japan have their own branched Godzilla franchises. Toho’s most recent Godzilla film, Godzilla Minus One, will release in the United States on the same day that Apple TV+ streams the fourth episode of Monarch.

To be fair, these two Godzilla franchises have been entwined for years. The American version of the monster, known as “Zilla”, appeared in the massive Toho crossover Final Wars in 2004. “Since this was the 50th anniversary film, I thought ‘Why not include the American Godzilla?’” explained Tomiyama. That said, the inclusion wasn’t entirely to celebrate Zilla. “There is some special meaning to having him in this film -- but mostly, we just wanted to show which Godzilla is stronger.”

In contrast, Monarch feels much more earnest in its efforts to reconcile these two very different visions of the iconic monster. This is reflected in Cate and Kentaro, two half-siblings on either side of the Pacific Ocean, with Cate forced to confront the realization that her father had “a whole secret life in Japan.” It also informs Keiko’s story, a Japanese scientist working for the American military in the wake of the Second World War. As Lee points out, she exists caught between two worlds.

Monarch suggests that these very different perspectives can be cumulative rather than exclusive, that one doesn’t need to choose between one or the other. One of the show’s recurring motifs is the overlaying of data, two seemingly disconnected data points overlapping to reveal a complete picture. In the show’s second episode, Keiko and Bill track a monster by combining his makeshift map of the island’s folklore with her printout of local radiation trails. Together, they form a complete picture.

It's an interesting hook for Monarch, a show which is primarily about fleshing out the mythology of this larger universe. The show doesn’t quite have the budget to offer Titan-sized thrills on a weekly basis, and so it concerns itself with the fabric of this world. At its best, it suggests that not only is Godzilla too big to be completely captured on screen, but that the monster is large enough to stand astride the Pacific.