I really, really, really want to call attention to the score by composer Leopold Ross in this scene. Director Andy Goddard, working off a script from showrunner Chris Black, lets the moment linger. He pretty much just points the camera at the two actors and lets them cook. But Ross’s score fills in the blanks. It’s a woozy, swooning, repetitive series of two notes, like a deep inhale and a deep exhale. Taken in tandem with the radiant acting of Russell and Yamamoto and the dreamlike background provided by the strange neither-here-nor-there fauna of the so-called “axis mundi” between our world and that of the titans into which they’ve fallen, it feels like a dream you might have of reuniting with someone you once loved, finding yourself as you are and them as they were, and all you have to share is sadness. I loved it.

I reviewed the season finale of Monarch for Decider.

No, don’t worry, I won’t bury the lede: This week’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters ends with a hero shot of actor Mari Yamamoto wielding a bow and arrow. In other news, I’m pregnant!

Certainly one of the great discoveries of this strangely sophisticated Godzilla TV show for American audiences is a woman who looks like she should be photographed by the same people as Marlene Dietrich, and that’s no doubt what I’m responding to. I’m kind of over the whole character you thought was dead comes back as a survivalist badass thing to be frank; that would not be “strangely sophisticated,” if you were wondering. But this character, who as the only major participant on the losing side of the first atomic war is the heart of the old Monarch enterprise, and this actor, who handled complicated romantic material with both of her leading men so adroitly…well, by all means, hand her Legolas’s gear and see what she can do.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

Some of the best, sweetest, sexiest, most convincing romantic storytelling being done on TV this year is happening on — get this — Monarch: Legacy of Monsters. I know! I didn’t see it coming either! But first with May and Kentaro, then with Kei and Lee, and now with Kei and Billy, this show has given the blossoming of romance the kind of casual intimacy and heat that makes you crave the stuff in the first place. That this week’s expert demonstration of yearning and desire involves the younger version of a crackpot character played by John Goodman and eaten by a monster in a film called Kong: Skull Island is part of the fun.

I reviewed this week’s Monarch for Decider.

In short, this is good stuff, written and acted and directed (by Hiromi Kamata) by people who believe this goofy science-fantasy universe can be used to tell human stories that are actually compelling, not just quote-unquote human, and who work with full commitment to this idea. I’m not ready to use the A-word as an overall comparison just yet, but no doubt about it: That’s Andor-coded behavior.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

The main characters of Godzilla Minus One are a kamikaze pilot living with the shame of refusing to kill himself to kill others, a survivor of the Tokyo firebombing who found herself caring for the baby of a woman she watched die, a sailor who wishes he’d been old enough to fight and a crew full of navy veterans who tell him he should be “proud,” in their words, to never have fought at all. I cried when the traumatized pilot twice had mental breaks in which he was convinced Godzilla had actually killed him years earlier. I cried when the orphaned little girl asked for her dead mother. The day I was found sobbing in front of the open produce drawer I had cried in the shower earlier over a different song from the score, “Resolution,” which sounds like all of humanity inhaling and exhaling as one. (I hear Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians and Bernard Herrmann’s Taxi Driver “Main Theme” in the song just for starters.)

Yamazki’s film is the best and worst of humanity refracted through a radioactive green lens. It’s uranium glass. It makes you feel the colossal weight of the crimes committed by both sides in World War II, embodies them in the form of Godzilla, and unleashes it on people who do not deserve to suffer and die. What more could you possibly ask from a horror movie?

My piece on Godzilla Minus One for Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World is now available to read for free, without a subscription!

Sometime last week my wife returned home from an appointment to find me sitting on the floor in front of our open refrigerator, surrounded by the groceries I hadn’t finished putting away, sobbing into my hands. I was crying, hard, because I was listening to the song “Last” from Naoki Sato’s score for Takashi Yamazaki’s Godzilla Minus One, released the weekend prior. I was crying because the song is a sonic last stand, the musical expression of a distant final hope for the survival of some beautiful doomed thing. In Yamazaki’s film the beautiful doomed thing is the population of World War II era Japan — fed into a meat grinder by a government so indifferent to their lives it had an entire program dedicated to killing its own pilots on purpose, subjected to the fires of creation itself by their swaggering conquerors, horrifically traumatized by what they saw on the front and what they survived in the rubble of their homes. An enormous monster that kills everything it sees is on its way to add more misery, destroy more families, rain more pointless death upon an exhausted people. And some of those people will give up their lives — instantly, reflexively, without thinking — to save the lives of others.

I’m pleased to be making my full-fledged debut at Luke O’Neil’s Welcome to Hell World with an essay on Godzilla Minus One, one of the best films of the year, and on Godzilla in general. The piece is for subscribers only, but great news: Luke has been generous enough to donate 7-day free trial coupons for anyone who wants to read it.

Now look here, Monarch: Legacy of Monsters: I came here for giant monsters. What gives you the right to spring a Mad Men–style storyline about explosive romantic chemistry in the workplace and the way desire can cause us to lose the things we hold dearest? On top of a bunch of totally awesome shots of Godzilla doing cool shit? At least give me a heads up next time!

I reviewed this week’s terrific episode of Monarch for Decider.

That’s the other thing: The whole concept of people who go into the ruins, collect photos and stuffed animals and other personal effects rather than valuables, and attempt to contact their owners to return them is just one of the artifacts of post-Godzilla life that crop up tantalizingly this episode. There’s the airport signage admonishing travelers to “respect the authority of ALL first responders,” the kind of uptick in low-grade authoritarianism you might expect in the aftermath of a literal monster attack. There are the underground bunkers for rich “tech bros” our heroes see advertised on airport TV. There’s the economy of state violence and military graft that determines who can and can’t trespass in the forbidden zone. There’s the constant drumbeat of denialism, of people who think it’s all a hoax to “burst the real-estate bubble,” as one kid puts it.  It’s all thoughtful, even provocative stuff.

Then there’s my favorite moment of all, one of the scariest split seconds of television in a long time. After an administrator admonishes Cate to take the warnings about the titans seriously and then departs, another woman is briefly seen running down the hall just before we cut away from this flashback. We know why: She’s seen what’s coming, and she’s about to tell a classroom full of children that their death awaits them. The show doesn’t lean on this at all, doesn’t even draw your attention to it. It’s just…there, hidden in the background by director Mairzee Almas. 

It’s a little uncomfortable texture in a world that, based on this episode, benefits from uncomfortable textures greatly. If Monarch can get to the Andor point, where you don’t need to be bombarded with capital-F Franchise stuff to feel what it’s like to live in that Franchise’s world…well, let’s not count our MUTOs before they’re hatched.

I reviewed today’s episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

I can’t remember who, but someone once said that a title like The Texas Chain Saw Massacre is more than a title, it’s a promise. In that light, I expect a show called Monarch: Legacy of Monsters to do certain things. So I’m really not sure where I come down on “Parallels and Interiors,” the show’s knowingly pretentiously titled fourth episode. On the one hand, you have an effectively sketched-out romance between characters with believable chemistry. On the other hand, there’s only one monster, and it’s not even a new one or a famous one. I’m not sure that’s a trade I’m comfortable making.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider. The inclusion of a strong, sexy, convincing romance storyline marks a turning point for the season, though I didn’t know this at the time I wrote the review. Stay tuned!

It can be a cheap trick for a popcorn flick or its TV equivalent to mine real-world tragedy for pathos. It’s so easy for the relative tastelessness of that kind of entertainment, much as I love so much of it, to read as defilement of something that should be held sacred. When it goes wrong, it does so in spectacular fashion: Marvel attributing the authorship of Hiroshima to one of its Eternals, say, or Bananarama’s “Cruel Summer” playing over the memorial for Emmett Till in Lovecraft Country. 

These are not accusations you can level at any project in the Godzilla franchise. Godzilla is inextricably linked to the horror of Hiroshima and Nagasaki specifically, and to the threats of nuclear war and environmental devastation generally. So when the third episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters depicts a Japanese woman trying to physically stop the detonation of a nuclear bomb while screaming in terror and grief, all I can do is respect it. With a paraphrase of “My God, what have I done,” writer Andrew Colville and director Julian Holmes underline what’s really going on here, though they respect you enough to catch it without anyone bringing up Dr. Keiko Miura’s nationality. In this franchise, they shouldn’t have to.

I reviewed this week’s episode of Monarch for Decider.

What a difference a dragon makes, huh? There’s a lot I find misjudged and misguided in Apple TV+‘s Monarch: Legacy of Monsters at this early stage, but they got at least this much right: They ended their two-episode series premiere with a huge berserk reptilian creature emerging from the wreck of a sunken World War II battleship that’s now on land for some reason. After all, this is not Monarch: Legacy of America’s Next Top Best Friend. There’s a promise the show makes with its very title, and it knows it has to deliver.

I’m not sure it’s delivering on much else at the moment, unfortunately. Once again written by co-developer and showrunner Chris Black and directed by Matt Shakman, this episode (“Departure”) is not, as I’d hoped, all delivery after the first episode’s setup. It’s basically more of the same.

I reviewed the second episode of Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider.

The MonsterVerse is a mixed bag. As an official welding together of the big screen’s two biggest giant-monster icons, Godzilla and King Kong, it mostly does what it needs to do, i.e. toss giant monsters at each other and get out of the way. But there’s a pretty wide range of quality in terms of the movies surrounding those monster fights. Kong: Skull Island is a charmingly berserk adventure-movie throwback, with a fun cast of memorable little characters. This puts it head and shoulders above the three Godzilla-led entries in the series, in which the characters range from inert to inane. But there are some truly awe-inspiring, almost cosmic monster visuals in Godzilla: King of the Monsters, and Godzilla vs. Kong has the lizard/ape action you crave. 

The biggest disappointment in the series is its opening entry, 2014’s Godzilla, for two reasons. First, it hides its monster effects by staging its fights at night, an annoying maneuver also employed by Pacific Rim. Second, it fails completely to deliver on the horror promised by the Bryan Cranston–heavy trailer (not least by killing off Bryan Cranston after the second reel). One of the reasons the subsequent entry, Kong, feels so strong is because it does just the opposite: It focuses squarely on its best actors, roots itself in horror with genuinely gruesome kills, and shows us its titans clashing in glorious broad daylight.

So there’s a template to be followed for Monarch: Legacy of Monsters, the new TV show set in the MonsterVerse — a set of Giant Radioactive Do’s and Don’t’s already established by the franchise. What approach will showrunner Chris Black, who developed the show with Matt Fraction, wind up taking?

I’m covering the new Godzilla TV show Monarch: Legacy of Monsters for Decider, starting with my review of the first episode. It has its moments.

It’s unlike me, but with Monarch I banked all the reviews I could in advance, so I’ve seen and reviewed the first eight episodes. My initial reviews won’t reflect it, but the show does get much better as it goes. The material centered on romance and on Godzilla himself is very strong by the end. The Russells are as good as you’d expect and Mari Yamamoto is really something.

Spectacle is the language through which art communicates when the vocabulary of the everyday fails us. Fantastic fiction, an inherent trafficker in the unreal, says as much through spectacle as any art form this side of musical theater, in which excesses of emotion transcend dialogue and emerge through the eruption of song and dance. That Act Two showstopper speaks to us (or rather sings to us) because we recognize what it is to be so in love; so enraged, so bereft, so drunk on the possibilities or vicissitudes of life that mere spoken words could never capture it. Only an explosion of sound and movement will do.

So it is with genre. The dragon, the android, and the vampire embody fears and dreams either too delicate or too overpowering for realism to express. Ratcheting up the scale and stakes of ideas and imagery like these to the level of spectacle renders them capable of handling even more intense feelings and fantasies. A trip beyond the infinite, a monumental horror-image like a wicker man aflame, a last terrible battle between good and evil: Such spectacles describe our desire and capacity as people to do things so great or terrible—or so great and terrible—that they stagger the mind.

Before they assayed updating a country’s biggest pop-cultural icon and helming the first large-scale battle on what was rapidly becoming television’s biggest show (respectively), Hideaki Anno and Neil Marshall were past masters of this technique. Anno’s Neon Genesis Evangelion pitted giant robots against increasingly bizarre godlike beings in battles that directly reflected the titanic scale of its protagonists’ adolescent angst. Marshall’s The Descent plumbed the depths of its heroine’s grief in a literal bloodbath.

Importantly, they each recognized the role of beauty in such spectacularly grim visions. From Anno’s awe-inspiring animated angels to the firelit scarlet of Marshall’s subterranean charnel pit, the gorgeousness of it complimented and enhanced the terror rather than canceling it out. Beauty is the sea salt in the caramel of horrific spectacle.

Both filmmakers applied these lessons to the biggest assignments in their careers. In 2012, “Blackwater,” his directorial debut on David Benioff & D.B. Weiss’s blockbuster fantasy series Game of Thrones, Marshall depicted the horror of war with an explosion that beggars anything seen on television before, and most of what has come since. In 2014, Anno and co-director Shinji Haguchi’s satirical but harrowing update Shin Godzilla destroyed Tokyo with an alien dispassion that reignited all the majesty and menace felt by filmgoers when the king of the kaiju first emerged decades earlier. And despite their differences, the techniques used by each to convey the magnitude of these unnatural disasters and the people they befell are strikingly similar.

I wrote about Hideaki Anno’s Shin Godzilla, Neil Marshall’s “Blackwater” from Game of Thrones, and the horrible beauty of spectacular violence for Blood Knife.

For letting the trailers fool me, I deserve what I got. I mean, to be fair, they didn’t fool me, exactly — I’m well aware that you can make a good trailer out of pretty much any film. But the movie promised by the trailer was very much my kind of movie: well-acted horror in which the horror dwarfs and makes mock of human ambition and self-conception.

But Godzilla‘s not a horror movie, it’s a blockbuster, and by that I mean blockbuster-as-genre, with all the faults that entails: cardboard-cutout leads, buildings meaninglessly collapsing, paper-thin women characters, and the glories of the U.S. military. (Yes, in a Godzilla movie! No, mentioning Hiroshima once doesn’t cut it!) Everything that was beautiful, moving, and scary in the trailers is beautiful, moving, and scary here, but with the exception of some unexpected and laugh-out-loud funny swipes at CNN, that’s the extent of the film’s value.

The soul of those trailers, Bryan Cranston, is absolutely amazing here, displaying total commitment to the work and bringing me to the brink of tears. The problem is that he’s so much better than everyone else in the movie that (SPOILER ALERT) when he dies at the end of the second reel, any incentive to give a shit dies with him. Seriously, did they not see the problem that sticking with this twist idea would cause? He’s so incandescent in every moment he makes everyone else look like the movie was some kind of community-service sentence. Poor Ken Watanabe is given nothing to do but glower his way through some exposition, and David Strathairn’s disinterest is so palpable I half expected him to take off his mic and walk off the set at any moment. The one exception is Juliette Binoche, but she dies even before Cranston does. Perhaps Cranston’s early departure was mandated by budget or scheduling, but all I can do is critique what wound up on screen, and it’s not even a matter of a counterfactual wherein his character was the lead instead of Aaron Taylor Johnson’s nothing of a Navy bomb technician: His character was the lead for half an hour, and that’s when it was a good movie.

Godzilla has strong kaiju visual effects, certainly stronger than those of Pacific Rim; you watch this and you just think Guillermo Del Toro should be even more embarrassed for himself than he already ought to be. But it’s hardly novel in that regard: The Mist and especially Cloverfield pioneered the use of modern-day CGI to convey the horror of scale, and in those films the one-dimensional characters and hackneyed tear-jerking moments are more easily forgotten since they really are horror movies, and really do try and occasionally succeed to be frightening and bleak. For all the ranting about how Gojira will send us back to the Stone Age, this is no apocalypse: Godzilla‘s supposed to leave you cheering and hungry for the sequel. It lacks the courage of Cranston’s convictions.

1. I posted about this on my A Song of Ice and Fire/Game of Thrones, and even before I made the connection with ASoIaF about ten seconds before I did so, I was thinking today about how Godzilla is presented here the way I like dragons to be presented in stories — as a total upending of all human endeavor.

2. It’s just such a pleasure to hear and see Bryan Cranston again, particularly since the Breaking Bad finale left a bad taste in my mouth. That’s not his fault — he’s a magnificent actor. Listen to how his voice is constantly breaking and being repaired, like, as an ongoing process effected through force of will. Watch how his eyes shift back and forth at the end of that opening speech, as though he’s so consumed by what he’s saying he can’t really decide how, or if, to focus it.

3. This is the kind of tonal commitment I like to see in genre work, provided it doesn’t devolve into self-seriousness. And I’ll admit, that line is thin, and subjectively drawn. But playing Godzilla as a horror movie, which it originally was, seems as valid a place as any to take the assumptions of the genre work in question and hit hard with them.