Review of Monsters (2010) by Michael L — 31 Dec 2011

Monsters is an art house, romance-on-the-road movie pretending to be a science fiction, horror, thriller and that is a very good thing. In fact this is one of my favorite new movies for this year.

Anybody who compares this film to District 9 or Cloverfield probably does not know who H.P. Lovecraft is nor have they ever seen a movie that was made before 1986.

In many ways the film's premise is similar to Tarkovsky's 1979 Russian movie Stalker which is based upon Arkadi & Boris Strugatsky's classic Russian alien novel The Roadside Picnic. In both the film & novel, aliens have visited Earth and left infected areas that are now forbidden zones where it is unsafe for humans to venture. Men who are know as stalkers illegally break into these forbidden zones to collect alien artifacts which are worth a fortune on the black market.

In Monsters, NASA has brought back alien life forms that are on the lose as a result of a space probe breaking up and crashing in Mexico. The movie starts 6 years after the probe has crashed and the U.S. is in the final process of "sealing off" Mexico with a gigantic wall. Think of it as the boarder fence replaced by the Hoover Dam. Once complete its alluded that the U.S. will spend the next 6 months eradicating the alien creatures & anyone in Mexico is stuck there in quarantine for the duration. The entire film follows a US photo Journalist & his bosses daughter as they travel through the infected zone in order to make it to America before they are stuck there as well.

What most fascinating about this movie is how little we actually see of the creatures. Gareth Edwards who is the film's writer, director, cinematographer & also did all of the visual effects himself, uses Lovecraft's less is more approach to storytelling and masterfully fills the film with an ever present sense of dread, foreboding & anticipation for an encounter with the creatures.