Review of Monsters (2010) by Andrew P — 12 Nov 2011

Weirdly, for a movie that combines the promise of aliens, giant monsters, and a cross-country adventure, the most intriguing and effective aspect of the film is the romantic storyline that runs compartmentalized throughout it. It's exactly for this reason that I give it such a low score. The movie should have decided what it wanted to be about, and I could have forgiven it for the love story being more interesting than the monsters -- this could actually be a very effective device -- but as it stands the romance just comes off as a subplot that accidentally outshines the main draw of the film.

The acting starts out poorly and thankfully -- yet strangely -- improves gradually throughout the film. This might have something to do with the improvised nature of the dialogue.

I've read a lot of reviews talking about how boring it was. They're referring to the fact that the movie has a lot of talking and pulled-back, objective cinematography of the ramshackle Mexican landscape, and is a little light on the monster action side. I don't mind a deliberately-paced sci-fi film that uses its creatures sparingly, so I wouldn't necessarily say I found the movie boring, but the pacing of the movie is so uneven and poorly balanced that you never feel any satisfaction or emotional resonance from the story and therefore are left feeling a bit hollow and spacey, for lack of a better term.

The movie was shot on mid-range prosumer cameras using a guerrilla style of run-and-gun shooting on location in Mexico, usually not acquiring permits for the places they were shooting in, using random strangers as extras, and not having much of a script. The whole thing was edited on consumer-level software, and the director, Gareth Edwards, did all of the special effects himself; the cgi for the aliens is pretty good. It's definitely head and shoulders above the kind you see in studio-financed Asylum movies like Sharktopus or Piranha Tiger 2 or Mega Dino-Shark and the Deathly Hallows, etc... -- so you could say that this movie is a bit of a red letter achievement in terms of independent film makers showcasing the possibilities of today's technology. But much like Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow, it really only functions as that tech demo of what we can do with the tools we have available to us, and not as a compelling film.