Monarch: Legacy of Monsters

This is great.....BUT.

The show is divided in to 2 parts, the origins of Monarch and then what Monarch has become (or contemorary time). BUT WAIT...there is more. The third and final division. Every crappy, boring and irritating moment of the show belongs in the May division.

The May character is one of the most annoying on screen inclusions of all time, worse than Jar Jar Binks!

Everything I dislike about the show is connect to May.

This means if you feel the same as me you will mostly dislike the middle episodes of the series.

SO...perservere. The series starts and finishes strongly, it is totally worth it, just read a book for the middle section :)

I've been looking forward to Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ever since I first heard about it. Then I saw the trailer and my excitement grew even more. I can say without a doubt that this series did not disappoint. First of all, Kurt Russell is in this. That's reason enough to watch it alone. His son Wyatt also stars. But throw in Godzilla and other monsters and you have a hit. This series digs into the Monarch agency and their role in keeping these monsters under control. It also shows how everyday people are affected by these monsters being let loose on the world and the role it takes. It takes place in two different time frames, the 50's and today. It's gotten great reviews by both critics and fans as it currently has a 87% on Rotten Tomatoes.

I was super excited for this show but it has been a super disappointment (at 8th episode so far). Only the first episode was good, it all becomes downhill after that. Only Apple TV was still producing big budget sci-fi like Foundation and Silo. Now they are also going to invest less in big world building saga citing the failure of Monarch.

The characters in the present time are so immature especially the teacher from San Francisco who seems to be a teenager living in an adult body. She is such a turnoff with her attitude similar to teenagers. May is useless and the brother from Japan, while not annoying, is so weak and useless.

I really don't care about their family drama or each of their backstory. This is a show about MONSTERS !! Why are we spending 90% of an episode with character backstory and their feelings, especially when none of them are likeable ?? Where are the MONSTERS? Where is the story about their habitats, their backstory, how they have been hidden for thousands of years, what is common between them, where do they come from? These are the elements that make a fantasy sci-fi interesting, not the annoying, unlikeable teenager mindset adults and their story.

They could have just kept this story in the 1940-50s and gone full on Monsters backstory, some WWII and Cold War drama about how many world powers were vying for the power of the Monsters and culminates in how this set off an underground Cold War that was hidden from the rest of the world with Monarch. Subsequent seasons could be what happened in the 70s-80s and so on culminating in D-day. Then once they catch up to current time, new seasons could be in between storylines between blockbuster Godzilla and Kong movies. This Monster universe could be the Marvel universe of this decade. Why are these Hollywood companies these days ruining entertainment ? People just want to be entertained, why is that so hard to understand? And the ironic part is that they could make a ton of money doing that.

I was really looking forward to this show from the get-go, and I decided to give it a fair shot by watching four episodes before jotting down my thoughts. The first couple of episodes? Pretty much what I was hoping for, but after that, it's been kind of a letdown.

The choice to cast Kurt and Wyatt Russel, an actual father-son duo, was a brilliant move. These two are knocking it out of the park! But, they're pretty much the only ones keeping things interesting. The other characters? They're just filling in the usual slots - the hacker/sleuth, the love interest, and the usual daddy issues.

With the big names behind this show, the folks who've brought us hits like 'Mad Men' and 'Severance', and penned blockbusters like 'Thor' and 'Iron Man', I was expecting something special. But, this show is just forgettable. It's not about the CGI or how the show looks - that stuff's all good. It's the way things play out on screen that just doesn't add up at times.

That said, what's keeping me interested is the story set in the 1950s. I hope the show brings more of that.

Even though I really liked the show, the good parts of the show was really good and deserved to be part of a much better show. Kurt and Wyatt Russel playing past and future versions of a character was really charming. But it was Mari Yamamoto who stole the show every time she appeared on screen, so much so that her appearance was what I was looking forward more like the occasional appearance of the monsters. But for all those good parts and the monster mayhem, there's so much things that are handled very badly. The human drama might not have been that bad when it was conceived but a lot of the situations were very forced and a lot of the dialogues were utter trash. The first three episodes were consistently of great quality and it was after that the quality dropped suddenly. Even though in totality, I thought it was good, it's a show that had great potential that ruined itself.