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Monsters (2010)

Director: Gareth Edwards

Time Out rating

Average user rating

19 reviews

Movie review

From Time Out London

It would be sad if the story of how British filmmaker Gareth Edwards created his captivating, micro-budget sci-fi film was to obscure its far greater achievement, being as it is a seamless blending of romance, road movie and monster flick. Shot guerrilla-style on location in Guatemala, Belize and Mexico – with two lead actors and local non-professionals improvising dialogue within a loose structure – ‘Monsters’ immerses the audience in a near-future world where the Mexican population has become blasé about the destruction wrought by giant, squid-like alien beings.

A few years after a Nasa space probe broke up on re-entry, a quarantined ‘infected zone’ stretches across Mexico to the US border – and it is through this zone that frustrated photojournalist Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) must escort his boss’s daughter, Sam (Whitney Able). This exhausting, epic journey involves trains, pick-up trucks, backhanders, boats, guards and ominous sounds from the jungle.

Desperate comparisons have been made with ‘District 9’ and ‘Cloverfield’ (not least by the film’s own marketing), but the digitally enhanced texture of the atmospheric ‘Monsters’ – with its weatherbeaten signs, barely glimpsed creatures and edgy encounters – evokes a sweaty, nervous reality rather than a clean, hard-edged artificiality. With the notable exception of the moving monster climax, the best scenes are the quiet, human ones, such as Kaulder flirting with Sam in a seedy hotel while scenes of monster mayhem are only glimpsed on a fuzzy black-and-white TV set. There’s an implicit political dimension too, with constant American bombing raids and a border wall designed to keep unwanted aliens out of the US.

Author: Nigel Floyd

Time Out London Issue 2102: 2 – 8 December, 2010

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User reviews of this film

ZodKneelsFirst said...

Posted on Oct 11 2011 15:48 Hated the lead actors and characters.
Massive plot holes.
I'd have been perfectly happy just to see the last fifteen minutes, but even then, you half expected Richard Herring to pop up and say "Aahhhhhh, see, not like you thought you nazi!".

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FTW said...

Posted on Aug 04 2011 09:44 What a romantic monster film. I'm in tears. Enjoyed it even more than The Host. Which is brilliant.

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Paul Strange said...

Posted on Jan 06 2011 15:39 I was bored. I wanted the monsters to eat the lead actors after the first half hour, and would have been happy if Julia Bradbury had taken their place and completed the walk. CGI was good, but I am not interested in how the film is made - not.

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gln said...

Posted on Jan 02 2011 12:20 The dialogue in this is awful, the acting is wooden, the script is boring and unrealistic. What a waste of time.

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Malcolm McAdam said...

Posted on Dec 27 2010 12:37 No one seems to be bothered by the small inconsistency of the film set on the border region between US and Mexico - an area characterised almost entirely by arid desert plains and moutnains - and the action taking place largely amid rain forest or the nonsense of finding a jungle-covered Maya temple on the Rio Grande? Otherwise an intersting, original and unusual film

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chris said...

Posted on Dec 19 2010 19:33 Not a bad story with good supporting actors, and great scenery and atmosphere. Great effects, but I walked out because the dialogue could have been written better by an eleven year old, and the two american spoilt brat lead charaters were simply too much to stomach. Avoid this film.

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dragster said...

Posted on Dec 17 2010 17:37 Ummm. I liked the locations/sets, thought the supporting cast performed admirably and that the two leads did well enough ASSUMING that you were not supposed to have any sympathy for either of them, the photojerk being depicted as somebody I would not want to touch with yours and the (forced engagement?) poor-little-rich-girl being a non-entity.
My problem with the film is that, given the setting, the story was trivial, did not exibit any logic and did not come to any normal conclusion. Since the octopii did not seem to have any ranged powers why did not the girl fly home? Why was there not more explanation of why the octopii were not dealt with quickly by conventional forces? Where were all the intermediate sized monsters (in vast quantities given the copious fungal/egg-sacks)? Why were the monster supposedly confined to Mexico given that they were amphibious and had already reached the coast? I'm all for the theory that an SF film can have a ridiculous premise, but that the story should develop rationally from that point but this film is devoid of any such logic.
Comparisons with Cloverfield and District 9? Cloverfield agreed, another crap film that provides no explanations but which does at least have the decency to kill off all the useless characters that have been introduced.
District 9 is in a different league, I would look forward to continuation of that story. As it is I look back at Monsters and declare it to be a waste of time, a shame since with a different script it is obvious that the crew could have produced something worthwhile.

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GS said...

Posted on Dec 16 2010 16:35 I found it an engaging and interesting take on an alien theme, Good .

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ric said...

Posted on Dec 16 2010 13:00 Liked the fact that it took a different perspective than other 'alien' type movies. Envolving alot of time towards the main characters which was nice but the title MONSTERS is misleading.3* at most but can relate to other reviews being 1 or two stars

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Simon said...

Posted on Dec 14 2010 22:05 It was as boring as hell...never ended. No chemistry between the leads, not entertaining. Poor dialoge and bad direction...I would say in a nutshell: better to stay at home!

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joe said...

Posted on Dec 14 2010 22:00 It was horrifyingly boring, and i haven't been tempted to walk out of a film until this one. No characterisation, poor plot, lots of shots of "infected zone" poster, no substance. Avoid at all costs.

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critique said...

Posted on Dec 13 2010 20:18 Distinctive if not entirely satisfying genre mish-mash. But why is it that extra-terrestrials in movies so often have tentacles?

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Alan Pearson said...

Posted on Dec 12 2010 18:36 Excellent film. The director manages to capture an atmosphere of tropical decay that works wonders. If you've ever been lucky enough to stand at the edge of tropical forest at dusk and had that foreboding 'what's around the corner of the path' feeling, this will get you by the guts, in a way that 'Predator' never managed. I've felt haunted by this film all week.

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Phil Ince said...

Posted on Dec 11 2010 22:17 A road movie but not a very good one. The leads are empty and the male character's behaviour often unconvincing. There’s a scene in the forbidden zone where a crashed plane is being dragged through a river by one of the aliens which reminded me rather of Roadside Picnic by the Strugatsky Brothers. The acting here's ok, nothing wrong with it but the parts aren’t good. Couldn't work out if some point was being made but the leads’ moronic selfishness is quite off-putting by the end. No idea what the makers were thinking. If the film has a point, it must be a fairly nihilistic one because the film itself is visually-efficient but ‘uhmuman’. Was it really only 93 minutes? Felt like a couple of hours.

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aaron barnes said...

Posted on Dec 09 2010 13:45 In one word YAWN

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