Monsters 0/10
(some fairly big spoilers)
Ugh.
Where to start? Well, I genuinely thought I would never have cause to give a
movie a zero rating. But here it is. There were literally no redeeming features
in this movie for me. It’s just... overwhelmingly bad. Of course, this is
massively subjective and I know some people loved it. But this is my review and
I’ll whine if I want to! Settled? Good.
The
epic badness of this film is so disappointing to me, because the premise is a
good one. A scientific mission in space crash-landed somewhere in Mexico. Alien
life forms emerged and settled in the area, quickly reproducing. Attempts to
eradicate them by the military are still on-going, but have so far failed. A
huge area of Mexico and South America has now been fenced off and quarantined,
and is known as the Infected Zone. This does not seem to stop the aliens from
encroaching on both sides of the zone, wrecking the lives of the people they
come into contact with and causing the people there to live in constant fear.
A
reporter has been tasked with finding his boss’s daughter, who is a tourist in
Mexico, and returning her to safety in the USA. However, when her passport is
stolen and the last ferry has departed for the States, they are forced to make
their way through the dangerous Infected Zone, and then find a way past the
giant wall built across the border of the USA.
I
haven’t been providing synopses for the films in these reviews, but it is
necessary here in order to demonstrate how much the movie completely fails. And
not only fails, but completely wastes what is actually a very good idea for a
film.
First,
the story itself is excruciatingly slow to get started, and when it does, it’s
a boring mess. Very little happens. This, of course, can work really well in
some movies. For example, what really happens in Duel beyond a truck driving a
bit too close to the back of a car? Yet Duel is an amazing movie, and that’s
because of the atmosphere, the tension and the ever present sense of very real
danger. The acting is also top notch in Duel. In Monsters, unfortunately, the
acting was flat, with very little atmosphere. The two main characters are
travelling through the Infected Zone, an area populated by colossal
octopus-like monsters that could easily kill them, and that have killed many
other humans, but they don’t seem even slightly scared. They just gawp at the
jungle around them and make really stupid comments. There is no sense of
threat, no sense of sadness at the ruined buildings and broken homes, and not
even a particular feeling of wanting to get home. They’re like robots drifting
along mindlessly and emotionlessly. And we’re supposed to believe that they
fall in love with each other on the way?
The
Monsters barely make an appearance. This might be cool, if they were kept
mysterious and frightening, always on the edge of the characters’ journey, a
constant threat. But instead they just plod through at one point, kill a bunch
of people pretty mindlessly, and then plod off again. They’re more animal than
monster, you see, just getting on with life heedless of the people they’re
stepping on. Again, cool concept, poor execution.
They
are seen once more at the end of the film, where they have some kind of alien
glow-in-the-dark tentacle sex, then plod off again. No, I’m really not making
this up. So when it becomes clear that we are supposed to feel sorry for the
aliens, to marvel at their beauty and to reflect that they are just, like us,
trying to get on with their lives, it all falls a bit flat. I don’t really give
a damn about the monsters, except for hoping that they’re going to eat the main
characters before the end of the film (no such luck).
You
can tell what this film wanted to be. It wanted to be a touching and unusual
love story, as well as a moral tale about humanity’s tendency to consider
anything different a ‘monster.’ It also desperately wanted to be an analogy for
how Americans treat Mexicans. I could have liked this if it had been done well.
I really enjoyed District 9, which does pretty much the same kind of thing,
using the aliens to create an analogy for apartheid. And no, I don’t need my
films to be full of explosions or directed by Micahel Bay to enjoy them. I’m
also not a fourteen year old boy. These seem to be the main insults directed at
people who didn’t like Monsters. But really, how can anyone like this? It fails
miserably. The romance is boring and unbelievable. The characters could
literally be blocks of wood and I would like them better. The monsters are huge
octopuses that plod around killing people – so why would I not consider them to
be a bad thing? Am I supposed to feel bad that the military is trying to kill
them? I guess if we just left them alone then they wouldn’t bother us either,
right? Except that they seem to enjoy coming out of the Infected Zone and
smashing innocent people’s homes, and there are even two octopuses plodding
around on the other side of the giant wall, smashing things in the USA too. Why
should I feel sorry for them? Because they have glow-in-the-dark sex? I’m
genuinely baffled as to what the director and writers were thinking.
And
were we really supposed to feel something about the wall, which is a metaphor
so glaringly obvious it felt like the director was hitting me over the head
with an ‘Americans are BIG MEANIES’ sign. The main characters are Americans who
have lost their passports and are now desperately trying to get into the States
from Mexico, but they come up against a big wall separating ‘us’ from ‘them.’
Yes, we get it already. You don’t need the characters to actually spell it out
for us. Which they do. From on top of an Aztec pyramid in the middle of the
jungle, staring out at the giant wall. (Aztec pyramids lying around in the jungle at the USA-Mexico border?) Obviously, this kind of heavy-handed
lecturing is never a good thing in a movie. And to make it worse, the
filmmakers do not even seem to really understand their own metaphor. The main
couple stand for Mexican illegal immigrants right? They’re trying to get into the USA illegally,
after all, and there is a giant wall stopping them. But the giant wall is to
stop the monsters. So the monsters are Mexicans? So Mexicans are terrifying
monsters who plod around killing people and having tentacle sex? No wonder the
USA wants to keep them out! Yes, I know I’m taking this too literally, but it
demonstrates how badly thought out the whole thing is.
This
movie was so joyless and preachy, I actually hate the fact that I spent time
watching the damn thing. I don’t care if it was free, I want my time back! I can’t believe I watched the
whole thing. I think I just kept waiting for it to get better, or at least for
the Monsters to eat them. Or for something
to happen! This was so boring. I
would rather watch Conan. I would rather watch Immortals. Heck, I would a
million times rather watch Twilight. I would genuinely rather watch the channel that just shows parliament talking
to each other – at least it’s funny to watch them attempt to insult each other
in their really British, upper-class way. So there you go. Zero stars. Not even
glow-in-the-dark tentacle sex could save this one, and that’s really saying
something.
