I don’t have a good track record with Godzilla movies, I always go into them thinking they’re going to be great and then they disappoint. My shortened review of one of them tells you everything you need to know:

So I wasn’t that bothered about the new TV series streaming on Apple TV+ that was a kind of sequel-prequel situation between movies, I’d been burned before. The only interesting thing about it was the clever casting of both Wyatt Russell and Kurt Russell as different ages of the same character. How to get a character look the same across the years? Keep it in the family!

Anyway, I gave the show a go and was blown away by how good it was. It took the good bits of any Godzilla movie and expanded on those, leaving the nonsense Titan fighting for a disappointing five minutes in the final episode. Instead of monsters ripping each other apart for no good reason, the majority of the series was intrigue and threat, mysterious nefarious organisations, and some great criss-crossing between decades to tell two stories that weave together so perfectly.

The young cast are great, I love the developing and twisting relationships between them - finding out you have a whole other side to your family can’t be easy in the best of circumstances, and this is not that. And then the storyline in the 50s showing early days of discovery and trying to utilise the military whilst also keeping them at bay… very good. Plus when the two stories converge and there’s that almost time-travel-esque element - yes please!

It did feel like they tried to go back and retrofit an explanation for why there is light underneath the earth (psst, silly billies, we’re not underground, we’re earth adjacent). But actually, that was the only time it seemed a bit shoehorned… and rather than being an annoying series trying to fit in between the movies, it was so good it actually made me want to go back and watch the film again to really pay attention to what’s happening to who and where. You saw the review, right? That’s quite the turnaround.

The series wrapped up well but left plenty of scope for more, so hopefully there will be a second on the cards. I feel like there’s a lot more we can learn about this Titan-universe, and as long as it’s as good as this Monarch show was, then I’m here for it.