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“Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” begins by taking us back to 1973.
And to Skull Island.
It is there and then we are reunited with John Goodman’s Bill Randa from the enjoyable 2017 movie “Kong: Skull Island,” making film recordings of what he sees, much of which is chaos. At one point, he turns the camera on himself and addresses someone, saying he can’t change the past — he can’t make up for his mistakes — but perhaps he can leave a “legacy.”
Soon, he is running from one of those giant spider monsters we saw in the movie. Reaching the edge of a cliff and faced with what would seem to be certain death, he tosses the bag he is carrying into the water, and he — and we — watch it float away.
Although the series is never quite this impressively thrilling again, these opening, well-constructed minutes of “Monarch: Legacy of Monsters” — which debuted Friday with two of its 10 episodes on Apple TV+ — nonetheless are fairly representative of the show’s consistent quality.
The show arrives after four big-screen affairs, starting with 2014’s “Godzilla.” Told in two main timelines, the present day of “Monarch” is set after the events of “Godzilla” — and thus well after what went down in “Kong: Skull Island” — but before 2019’s “Godzilla: King of the Monsters.” For the record, it is the second MonsterVerse series, following Netflix’s animated “Skull Island” show.
Cities now have marked evacuation routes and sirens set up in the event of an appearance by the giant lizard-like creature. The world lives in fear of another “G-Day,” the name given to Godzilla’s introduction to an unexpecting San Francisco in 2014.
Cate Randa (Anna Sawai), the granddaughter of Bill, was in San Francisco that day and is haunted by flashbacks. We meet her in 2015 as she is traveling to Tokyo to uncover mysteries connected to her late father, Hiroshi (Takehiro Hira), who worked for the secretive multinational organization Monarch, which has been keeping tabs on Godzilla, Kong, and other “Titans” and MUTOs — monsters of myths and legends — for years.
What she finds is that her father seemingly had a second family in Japan and that she has a half-brother in Kentaro (Ren Watabe). Although she initially attempts to go back home, now more angry about her father’s familial secrets than curious about his work, she soon is chasing down clues with Kentaro and his computer-wizard ex-girlfriend, May (Kiersey Clemons).
The series’ other major timeline takes place decades earlier, as a younger Bill (Anders Holm) works with another scholarly type, Keiko (Mari Yamamoto), and a well-intentioned military man, Lee Shaw (Wyatt Russell), to start Monarch and get a better handle on this little-understood monstrous threat to humanity.
The latter is the stronger of the two storylines, in no small part to a love triangle developing with Bill, Keiko and Lee. In the former, we get a bit too much of Cate, Kentaro or May each getting fed up with the situation at one point or another and threatening to walk away from the other two.
Their timeline gets a boost from the star power of one Kurt Russell, the father of Wyatt, portraying the older version of Lee, who teams up with this new generation of heroes. It’s an obvious but terrific bit of casting.
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