MONSTERS (2010)
Director: Gareth Edwards
Genre: Sci-Fi, Drama
With recent movies like Children of Men, District 9 and Moon, we seem to be having something of a renaissance in thoughtful social problem sci-fi . Now we have director Gareth Edwards' Monsters, which, while not as good as those movies, offers up a Mexican-set giant monster story which has roots in the current political situation between the US and its southern neighbor. While a lot of the political commentary is in the background of the movie, it is clearly extrapolated from real world current events and the (US-caused) alien monster outbreak in Mexico is cleverly layered over existing issues like illegal immigration and the War on Drugs. With a huge chunk of Mexico considered an "Infected Zone" in the movie, American conservatives finally got to build a massive militarized wall along the border, and, ironically, two Americans have to be smuggled to it.
The focus of Monsters is heavily on the relationship between the two lead characters: the daughter of a wealthy family who is stranded in Mexico and a photojournalist who is tasked with bringing her back to the US. It is really more of a quiet character-driven indie road movie than the orgy of action and special effects you might expect from the title . I've grown fond of calling it Lost in Monstration for its foreign setting and the weird quasi-romantic relationship at its core.
Monsters is a gorgeous-looking movie and it captures the particular beauty of Mexico, here often in ruins. The vivid Latin American color palette is muted with smoke and rubble. The movie presents us with a haunting apocalyptic vision contrasting ruined urban landscapes filled with architectural skeletons and jungles dotted with Mayan ruins and abandoned military hardware.
For a movie that gets a lot of mileage out its Mexican setting, Monsters makes some inexplicable mistakes about the country's basic geography. When the characters finally reach the US border near the end of the movie, they find the terrain covered in jungle and peppered with Mayan pyramids, which would more accurately be Mexico's border with Guatemala to the south. Anyone who has ever been to the arid American southwest will have a good idea what the US border would look like. C'mon, guys, look that shit up.
THE MONSTER/EFFECTS
The movie handles its creatures in an interesting way. For most of movie, the monsters are either referred to, glimpsed in Cloverfield-like video clips, or seen in illustrations and photos, which is in keeping with the movie's emphasis on its human protagonists. The monsters are handled in a way that is refreshingly casual, instead of reverential. The movie is not trying to knock you over the head with CGI. As in Cloverfield, the creatures are kept mysterious, except for the fact that they crashed to Mexico on some sort of NASA sample return mission which immediately overran a large chunk of Mexico, the "Infected Zone."
Once we finally see them, they are somewhat of a letdown, though. While an octopus is a great starting point for an alien creature-the tentacles, the slimness, the soft boneless body-the aliens of Monster look a little too much like octopi. Other than their size, bio-luminescence, and their ability to walk on their tentacles, they are pretty much Space Octopi. Maybe they are from the Mon Calamari system. It is unimaginative creature design and somewhat of a letdown after being teased for the whole movie. But again, Monsters is not really about monsters.
HOME VIDEO AVAILABILITY
Currently in select theaters and available On Demand.
SEE ALSO
Cloverfield 2008, District 9 2009
TRAILER
Patrick Garone
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