http://www.thisislondon.co.uk/film/revi ... onsters.do
DIY destruction in Monsters
David Sexton By David Sexton
03.12.10
Watch Avatar and it’s easy to feel you never want to see a big budget science fiction movie ever again. Enough with the dragons. Blue people, meh.
Monsters is the antidote. It was made with as near as you can get to no budget at all. It was written, directed, filmed and designed by Gareth Edwards, a 35-year-old British visual effects specialist. He took his cast of two and crew of four to Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Belize, where they improvised scenes, recruiting locals as extras. Then he got to work editing the footage and adding special effects — ie the entire science fiction component — on a laptop, using off-the-shelf software, Adobe’s After Effects, a development of PhotoShop.
The film that has resulted is thus both improvised and about improvisation, always aware of its own haphazard method. Six years ago, a space probe, collecting extraterrestrial samples, crashed on re-entry over Mexico. Now a huge area is a fenced-off “infected zone”, still inhabited but swarming also with aliens, seeding themselves in the jungle as pulsing fungi, growing into 150m-high squiddy things, roaming at night. The military attack constantly with planes, tanks and gas but the policy is just containment — keeping the creatures out of America. So we’re in the middle of a situation where aliens have become part of the fabric, just like in District 9.
Into this landscape, littered with burnt-out tanks and crashed fighters, studded with wrecked buildings, come Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), an edgy, selfish freelance photographer, and Sam (Whitney Able), a troubled rich-girl tourist, running away from home. Sam’s dad owns the paper Kaulder wants to work for and he orders him to bring his daughter back safe. That’s the whole plot.
The rest is their journey to the border, increasingly hazardous, by train, by car, by boat, on foot, through epic landscapes, including thick forest. The pair, initially suspicious of one another, come together, in a mumbly, gap year kind of way. War of the Worlds gives way to Before Sunset.
The film is quite slow and episodic, deliberately shunning the normal narrative arc of monster films (fight them, beat them). Actually, it’s a bit eco about the calamari, suggesting they’re only dangerous when irritated by attack. In the scene in which we see them most fully, a pair seem at first threatening but then make passionate squiddy love together, a scene that lacks only David Attenborough whispering excited commentary.
Obviously, there’s a political subtext about America’s way of dealing with aliens, whether it’s Latino immigrants or the Taliban. Staring at the giant wall that keeps the critters out, the kids say, portenteously: “It’s different looking at America from the outside.” “When you get home, it’s so easy to forget all this.”
No matter. It’s oddly likeable anyway, affably alt, feeling more like an amateurish installation than a Hollywood blockbuster. Every scene has real texture, genuine tension. And our romantic leads work well together (a couple when it was shot, they have married since). Able (in 2008, number 83 on Maxim’s Hot 100 List, remember?) obligingly wears tiny shorts and a red singlet throughout. Some things it’s better not to change.
Shows we all have different tastes and opinions.
