Monsters (2010)

(Preface: This is a slightly edited repost from my old blog. It was written in either 2011 or 2012. I have added a few thoughts from here in 2017, indicated in italic parentheses.)

The first feature film from director Gareth Edwards, 2010's Monsters is something of a 28 Days Later movie for the monster genre. It's a pretty simple story, following photographer Andrew Kaulder as he is given the task of bringing his boss's daughter Sam home to the United States. It's basically a road trip movie with a love story at the core. And, of course, there are giant alien creatures that destroy cities and trucks.

Monsters is practically the definition of guerrilla film making. With a budget of $500,000, the film is shot entirely on location throughout five different central American countries. Often, they would have to move quickly to shoot scenes without disrupting the every day life of those places. They also would make up scenes on the spot if they found something that looked visually interesting. The best example of this was the scene with the candle light vigil. Edwards and crew just stumbled upon the Day of the Dead celebration in Mexico. Seeing this, Edwards gathered the actors and crew to come up with a scene that could utilize the event around them. They then found a place to put it into the film. The end result is a tonal shift that really enhances the sense of devastation from the creatures. This is generally how they shot most things.

Edwards does an excellent job keeping the focus on just these two characters while giving a sense of scale with images of destroyed buildings and boats in the background. With a lot of monster movies, you don't really get a sense of the ground level. We tend to see the larger impact of the beast. It's threat is global. Here, we just get a taste of the larger scale, but we ultimately connect to the human cost of giant monster attacks. And when we finally see the beasts in action, the graphics are solid with a good sense of fear from the characters. Instead of pulling back to show us the entire attack, we get shots of the attack from Sam and Kaulder's perspective, making it feel more personal.

The chemistry between Kaulder and Sam is a little rough at first, but builds over time. Some dialogue seems forced or poorly prepared (as they probably made it up just before the shoot), but overall, they do seem to genuinely connect. This is probably in large part due to the fact that actors Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able are actually married in real life. Able plays Sam, a young woman adrift in the midst of an unsure engagement. McNairy plays Kaulder as the annoyed babysitter who wants nothing more than to stay in Central America to take an award winning photograph of a real live monster. Kaulder is impatient, often bordering on outright mean. It's a little unclear why Sam can't just take herself home when she seems to have more money and has an actual grasp on the language (she speaks it fluently while Kaulder can only give an awkward "hasta luego" at times). In this way, the basic premise of the plot is a bit contrive, with the owner of the publishing company Kaulder works for issuing an ultimatum to bring his daughter home in the aftermath of a creature attack.

What makes the beasts seem even more frightening is the real footage put in. Often, we see CGI boats or buildings destroyed in the background of shots, but Edwards also makes it a point to shoot scenes anywhere there was real rubble. In the first scene after the opening credits, we see Kaulder walking up a hill of rubble and broken buildings as he searches for Sam. All of it is real. Similarly, when they get to the destroyed town in America, a storm had just hit and the town really was devastated. There's also a cool shot of a road that just seems to end. The road had been wiped out by a flood prior.

The CGI looks pretty good too. Granted, there ultimately isn't much of it which winds up being the best thing for the film. It's reliant on post production CGI to show the power of the creatures, but it's still used sparingly. This is ultimately a movie about the people, not the monsters. Most of the CGI used winds up being used to put signs into the backgrounds! Tension is created through implications - kind of like how Steven Spielberg had to get creative due to the technical difficulties of the mechanical shark in Jaws.

A lot of people have complained that it's kind of a boring movie and nothing really happens. It's more personal in scale and a bit more somber in tone than typical monster movies, to be sure. And for a movie called Monsters, you only really see them a handful of times. You don't really see them attack anything except a couple of trucks. Still, once they get to America, things get particularly interesting. As a lifelong fan of the genre, it is among my favorite sequences ever in the category of "monster flick."

The final sequence makes the whole movie, really. In an abandoned part of America, Sam and Kaulder find a gas station which they use to call for help. The military is dispatched to rescue them and they're left to simply wait. While they wait, Sam calls her annoyed and overly concerned fiance while Kaulder calls his child. All of the things they've discussed on their travels come to a head here that culminates in a monster investigating the gas station.

The scene starts off as something of a nod to The War of the Worlds. Sam is alone inside the building when she hears the door open. Thinking it's Kaulder returning from the payphone outside, she looks happy for a moment before realizing that instead, it's the long, creepy tentacles of an alien creature. The tentacles investigate the store for a few minutes while Sam struggles to keep it together. Meanwhile, Kaulder is powerless to do anything but watch from outside. It's a pretty tense moment!

A second monster shows up and the two creatures proceed to connect via several tentacles and - presumably - mate. While this happens, Kaulder is still motionless outside watching. Slowly, Sam comes outside to watch what is transpiring as well. As the two creatures intertwine with each other more and more, Sam moves closer and closer to Kaulder.  By the time the creatures are done and move on, Sam and Kaulder are finally in the same shot together. In the background, we hear the incoming humvees and helicopters of the rescuing military party. Finally, Sam admits that she doesn't want to go home. She essentially admits that whatever is waiting for her back in the safety of her normal life is scarier to her than these creatures. The two finally kiss before the military shows up and pushes them into separate humvees.

It's a sequence that goes all over the spectrum. It starts off tense and frightening and ends up with a display of honesty and beauty. These monsters aren't really monsters. They're just creatures, doing what they do. The way that Sam and Kaulder kind of parallel the movements of the monsters is perfect, and suddenly everything makes sense.

The film is essentially just the story of these two characters set in this environment (and there are a number of plotholes, but they're not huge or distracting). It's possible to read into the film a number of different ways. From the outset, you get a sense that it's trying to say something about immigration. The "Infected Zone" is from the middle of Mexico to the border of the United States. The US's response is to build a giant wall at the border to keep the aliens out (this aspect takes a whole new focus given the political climate of 2017). Meanwhile, good, hardworking, family oriented people are being kept out of safety as a result. It could also be argued that the film is a way to show how perilous the actual passage to the United States can be. The messages here seems clear.

Still, the wall ultimately fails and when Kaulder and Sam get into the United States, they see good ol' American towns destroyed by the aliens. If we were to continue the immigration metaphor, it would then suggest that the aliens will get in anyway. And not just that, but destroy America as well! These are both easy messages to take away if reading too much into it. At the end of the day though, it seems pretty unclear if Edwards was trying to say anything at all on the topic.

Monsters isn't for everyone. It isn't action packed and can feel a bit slow-paced at times. Its guerrilla style film making makes it seem ultra-realistic at times while seeming forced at others. It abandons a lot of typical monster movie tropes. Similar to how Danny Boyle wanted to explore life after the breakout in 28 Days Later, Edwards wanted to explore life after the initial monster attacks. It's a place where everyone carries a gas mask and destruction is just part of life. Seeing destroyed tanks or dead creatures is completely normal. This change of pace makes it one of my favorite movies of the past few years.

As a side note: this film ultimately got Gareth Edwards the job for the Legendary reboot of Godzilla. Though I happen to still have some doubts, the way that Edwards showed the dark, human costs of monster attacks in Monsters gives me a lot of hope for his take on Godzilla. When he started work on Monsters, he said he just wanted to make a monster movie. And now he gets to make the mother of all monster movies. (Follow up a few years later: it seems like the concerns were merited, but that the strengths Edwards showed on Monsters proved beneficial to Godzilla as well. He definitely did more than most Godzilla films to show the dark, human cost, and his eye for scale stood out as well.)