User Reviews

I've had my issues with the show overall, but I have to point out the major success of this series.

For most of the series, I found a lot of the characters quite irritating. All the characters from the past timeline like Shaw, Billy & Keiko had great chemistry & were fun to watch. Their history & story was the main reason each episode didn't feel like a total waste.

But Kentaro, Cate & especially May were whiny, mopey, sassy or rude 99% of the time. Thankfully older Shaw & Tim (from Monarch) helped balance it out, but I kept asking myself why the writers would make everyone so unlikable. I get that they were all dealing with their own personal drama, grieving, or supposed to be confused about the mysteries, but they weren't given any real positive traits or depth to make you root for them either.

However, by the end of the series they started improving, especially in their family ties & wanting to be there for each other. I'm trying not to spoil anything, but by the end of this episode I felt myself tearing up. Never in my wildest dreams did I think 1) a Godzilla-related series would ever do that to me, and 2) that THESE characters could pull that off.

I was wrong! This show succeeded in getting me to care about the humans. Godzilla Minus One did that as well, but I still wasn't near tears or anything. Make no mistake, that film is an overall better experience, but this series earned its reason to exist.

Not only that, I'm actively wanting to see a second season. Had you asked me half way through the episode count, I would've said I couldn't care less. I'd rate this series a 7.5 out of 10, and this episode a 9!

...... if your eyes are still dry at the end of this episode your as stone cold as Lo-Pan." The last two episodes have the best acting and tightest scripting of the whole of season one. Very predictable, but in a nice way. Definitely makes up for the 3 or 4 filler episodes in the season which is nice but still feel if they'd have just had 6 (maybe 8) episodes this show would be regarded more highly.

Now if you're one of those crazy people that reads all the reviews of a show before you actually watch it, please take my advice and do yourselves a favour, watch the first 3 episodes in a block, the following episodes while you're 'working from home' and the last two as a mini movie, you'll enjoy S1 much better that way. Ps the flashback scenes are the best throughout, they could've made a full show just on this time period (and I'm not usually a fan of prequels).

That's how you end the season of a show. Perfect from start to finish and the cliff hanger is stellar! Guessing it leads up to the next Kong/Godzilla movie. This episode made me want to watch the show all over again as soon as I finished. Great episode! People complaining about not enough Titans and too much about just the people....well this episode should satisfy those people. Overall very well executed show. And just to reach the word limit, I will say again, this is how you end a show....right here! One of my favorite endings of a show ever. Just watch it and enjoy it for what it is! Word limit. Word limit!!

It's a shame it had to end, not that it has.

After 10 weeks, the season finale is an expensive looking cgi-fest set in the other place with finely done Godzilla v Kaiju, sorry Titan, action. But the real explosions come from the family reunion of Grandmother Keiko coming to terms with her stolen lifetime, the tragedy of loss and missing out, before reuniting with her adult son and grandson. Truly heart melting stuff in a complicated way.

What AppleTV+ seems to get, more than the movies its tieing in with is that the Kaiju, sorry Titans, are at their best when they are cyphers through which the human drama flows. Definitely the most interesting aspects were the 50s tryst that led to Monarch's inception, the inevitable betrayals and sacrifice, and adding in the contemporary post millennial globalised angst of humanity's dual nature and infidelities, these small dramas become very big very quickly, a recurring theme throughout.

The spectacular set pieces are that; spectacular and mercifully short punctuating the drama without overwhelming it.

The Americanised Godzilla is fantastic, mainly because he can move his neck but seems more benevolent than the Japanese incarnation, mainly cast as a sentry preventing Kaiju, sorry Titans, from entering the human realm and not wilfully causing carnage, presumably setting up his buddy-up with Kong in the next movie. A far cry from his Angel of Death role in Gojira, Godzilla 1984 and Minus One.

Likeable characters throughout, even the baddies, the show did lose some of its edge when the CGI became more prevalent but thanks to the actors involved, it never lost its humanity.

It's exceedingly rare these days for big budget productions to simply not ruin beloved franchises...rarer still that they honor & do justice to the history of what's come before. Rarest of all is when they do everything right, AND add something well-written, acted, & produced with heart.

Monarch has done it.

This is the level of quality fans hope for (and should expect) from every studio that capitalizes on our favorite franchises; they don't need 'fixing' or modernizing, or inserting agendas - they only need to be respected. All fans want are good stories. This finale is proof.

THIS is The Bar, Hollywood. Aim for what this show did.

Thank You everyone who worked on this season - very much looking forward to the next!

Whilst the previous 9 episodes were disappointing to say the least, this finale did redeem some credibility to the Kaiju genre. I just wish the rest of the season was as good as this final episode. As the season progressed I did on a number of occasion consider abandoning it completely but I had invested too much of my curiosity with how it would finish. I would say, if they renew it for a second season, and they decide to continue the formula of having 40 odd minutes of teenage drama and 2-3 minutes of Titan's ...and only making the season finally of quality and substance to the genre, then this series will not last. Hope they try better for second season!!!

The whole season people have been leaving low reviews because everyone expected this show to feature a bunch of titans, and they've probably gotten less than five minutes of total screen time in the entire ten hours of airtime.

But the two episodes where Godzilla showed up for more than 15 seconds, boom, great reviews, "This show is back on track!"

I feel like it's glaringly obvious that these creators know exactly what they are doing. They knew their audience was itching for A SERIES featuring state of the art CGI Titan battles. And they gave their audience as tiny of a dose as they could possibly get away with.

The rest of the story in this show is pretty underwhelming. I admit with no shame that I am one of those that was hoping to see some epic Titan battles, and feel like I've been scammed, but I also love Kirk Douglas and tuned in specifically because I saw he was on the cast. However his character is one of the most underwhelming parts of the show for me.

So far, this show doesn't seem to know what it needs to be, but I am hopeful that they were just creating an atmosphere in Season 1, and it will be one of those series where, when you recommend it, you have to tell people that they have to get past S1, because the rest of the show is legendary.

Sadly, if that's the case, they definitely failed to get me deeply invested in any of the characters (besides Godzilla). But I'll keep watching with the hopes that I am right that they were just setting the stage for Godzilla to take on all sorts of new and exciting Titans that we have never seen before.

My son is very into the Monsterverse that Legendary has put together these last few years, so we are happy to have the chance to sit down together, once a week, and watch this companion series - widening the mythology of this world.

Having survived Godzilla's San Francisco incident, traumatised Cate Randa (Anna Sawai) investigates her father's whereabouts, which leads her to discover he had an alternate family in Japan. She continues the investigation with her new half-brother Kentaro (Ren Watabe) and his friend May (Kiersey Clemons) and the uncover her fathers links to Monarch, a covert force investigating the Titans. They connect with Lee Shaw (Wyatt and Kurt Russell) a retired Monarch operative who was friends with both their father and grandparents, who were key figures in Monarch's establishment.

Each episode mixes a modern day (well... 2015) storyline alongside scenes from various years following the second World War explaining the origins of the Monarch organisation, it's establishment of the existence of Moto's and the loss of founder Keiko Miura. Both storylines are complementary to each other, though perhaps both underplay the role of Hiroshi Randa - who is the very physical link between both halves of the plot. I think the show gets the balance right between the human storyline and monstrous interference and the man himself, Godzilla regularly appears in the series.

Everything technically was really good with the series, performances were decent as were the expensive looking visual effects that the show needed. I have heard that aspects of the story were a bit complicated for people who weren't already on board with the wider storyline, the significance of Apex cybernetics for example, but that wasn't us, so I can't say we bounced off it. The storyline does perhaps hit the same beats a bit to often, with Tim having to prove his worth a few too many times. The score is really good, particularly the theme music, which we were humming all the time.

The only concern is whether enough people will have watched the show, on what is still quite a small potential audience on Apple TV, to justify what must be an expensive series. Nothing confirmed at the time of writing.

I wonder what this show classifies as? It's not SciFi. It's not fantasy. It's not historical. It's not really fiction. It is dribble though. Why are the Gen Z actors involved? They bring nothing to the story except for whines, moans and tears. The whole show of ten episodes can be concluded in 2 hrs max. The monster lovers may like this episode as you got to see three of them. The rest of us who like a good story were sadly disappointed. Again. The graphics are good but I dare say they spent all the budget on that and there was nothing left for the script. Kurt Russels appearance was more cameo than anything else. Maybe trying to entice older viewers? Again they'd be sadly disappointed. I confess I watched a total of 15 minutes of this episode by fast forwarding big chunks. Maybe I missed something. Then again I probably didn't.