Monsters…I think?
So I watched the movie Monsters this evening. I had never actually heard of this movie, even though it apparently came out in 2010. It was on the DVD rack while I was walking out of the library, so I checked it out. While I don’t think it will be contending for The Academy anytime soon, it’s an interesting movie for a number of reasons.
The plot is pretty simple – NASA detected evidence of alien life several years ago and sent a probe, which returned to Earth but crashed in the general region of the US/Mexican border, and caused an alien infestation. As a result, a big swath of territory – mostly in MX but some across the southwest US – has become the ‘infected zone’ and is walled off on the US side, while heavily bombed and monitored by US and MX troops to attempt to control the aliens. The central character(s) are a young(er) freelance photographer in MX (trying to take closeups of the aliens he can cash in when back in the US) and a young female, possibly a marine biologist (hinted at but never confirmed) – whom he retrieves from a hospital on behalf of her father (his publication employer back in the USA) and together they try to get back to the USA – he to his estranged young son, she to her fiancee so she can get married and resume her life.
So while this story has been done in quite a few variations, not all of them science fiction (e.g. road trip, quest/journey movies, etc.), there are interesting departures from even the recent versions of this theme.
First, while the monsters here largely look like huge, 100-ft+ walking octopi with many extra tentacles, you don’t get much of a sense of them as characters (e.g. unlike District 9) nor much variation (unlike Cloverfield), although they seem to have a stationary incubation form too. The ‘infected zone’ here is much more a quarantine rather than an implied racist encampment as was the case in District 9 (or even the much earlier Alien Nation).
Second, the film goes out of its way, possibly due to a lower budget (not sure) to have long sequences of bleak music and no dialogue between the characters or their Mexican handlers (a variety of boat, truck and caravan drivers/armed guards help transport them north for much of their journey). While sometimes this gets a bit repetitive – other times it provides moments of reflection and identification with the main characters – what would YOU do in such a situation? How would the world deal with such an ‘infected zone’ if it actually existed? Would the Mexican govt. tolerate frequent American jet-bombing raids over their country in the name of killing aliens? The main two characters discuss at least some of this with their handlers around the campfire one night, and again, while not much dialogue there either – it still provokes thought for them and the viewer – the mexican perspective is quite different.
The end sequence with the aliens is also different than most such movies (certainly way different than Cloverfield’s end and any Godzilla/kaiju movie I’ve ever seen) but it doesn’t explain much, either. It leaves the interpretation up to the viewer – but at least a few of those have to be on the optimistic side?
The effects are on balance pretty good but I suspect they kept alien activity to a minimum to save on money. Nearly all the movie seems to have been shot on location and this is pretty effective – I have to believe that the burned out neighborhoods they show in the infected zone had to have been (still) leftover, abandoned housing from Katrina or similar. Certainly much of the journey would not have lent itself to special effects, although it’s not clear whether they are really in Latin America or not. There is at least a decent amount of hand-held camera work, again reminiscent of Cloverfield, but not nearly as frantic in most cases.
What’s also interesting is that the various Mexican characters – almost none of which have names or many scenes, they usually function to keep the plot rolling forward in most cases – seem to take the situation in their same ‘live life as it comes’ way they always have. Even as the Americans proceed deeper and deeper into the infected zone, there are still people living there and trying to survive, same as always. A veiled commentary on the US? Perhaps….
Ultimately, the overall impression is one of a world even more paranoid and unstable than the one we already live in – not unlike that of 28 Days Later or Children of Men, especially the latter’s very bleak, dystopian view of the future world.
Anyway, if you like such movies, you may like this one as a quick view – it’s only 90 min. or so long.
candybowl
Tags: '10s, aliens, dystopia, malevolence, military, monsters, movies