REVIEW: Monsters (Gareth Edwards, 2010)

The underdog always has our sympathies, because that's how so many of us view ourselves.  Even the winners among us face the uphill struggle toward whatever victory they seek.  Certainly that's why I latch onto a film like Monsters with such enthusiasm.  Not just because it's an excellent genre picture, but because director Gareth Edwards created this film on a miniscule budget with a skeleton crew, improvising dialogue and unifying hours of run-and-gun footage in post-production.  I have great admiration for those who forge ahead and make their art with clear passion.  Major motion pictures, with the studio politics and committee involvement necessary to clear the expensive hurdles of casting and production, so rarely feel driven and purposeful and direct.  A good smaller film can carry its idiosyncrasy and vision with pride.

The main characters witness a vigil for those lost in the infected zone.

In the past few years, I've fallen for quite a few of those smaller genre projects.  Some of the best include the time-travel mind-bender Primer, speculative chamber drama The Man From Earth, and existential dread machine Cthulhu.  Monsters belongs in their company; it's an amalgam of road picture, fright flick, and mumblecore romance, sometimes meandering, often evocative and involving.  Some scenes will remind you of Before Sunset, with the understated attraction between the two leads (now married in real life).  Others recall Apocalypse Now and Aguirre: The Wrath of God, with pale light breaking through the thick Mexican forests. Between the rural environments and the mud-caked signs warring of "extraterrestre," the settings impose without losing their beauty.

As in District 9, the multi-faceted use of "alien" is obvious but still valuable.

What story the film chooses to pursue involves the careful set of plot contrivances necessary to put Andrew (Scoot McNairy) and Samantha (Whitney Able) together, trekking through a dangerous portion of Mexico now labeled as an "infected zone."  A satellite crashed there years ago, releasing samples of alien life into the wild.  When fully grown, the aliens look like T-Rex-sized octopi, proving that all movie monsters ultimately swim in Lovecraft's cephalopodian wake.  The Mexicans survive the enormous beasts by treading carefully and wearing gas masks.  Americans survive by building an enormous King Kong wall to keep the E. T.'s out.  If Germany and China have taught us anything, it's that big walls are generally more trouble than they're worth.

Images like this sustain the picture.  Dwarfing and awesome.

Besides, the aliens may not be as predatory as they are treated.  Their scuffles, mostly limited to the militants in the film (who provoke them with preemptive strikes), indicate defense, although a suspenseful unprovoked assault on a caravan leaves the question open.  Can the two species co-exist?  The answer may come in a lovely scene at the end, where we see two of the aliens encroach upon the heroes at an abandoned gas station.  The aliens, if anything, seem indifferent to us; their focus lies on each other.  The film may not carry much in the way of traditional horror tropes, but Edwards never runs low on awe.

As in Cloverfield and Spielberg's War of the Worlds, our perspective stays grounded.

Andrew becomes our surrogate for Edwards's visions.  He's a professional photographer who points his camera and shoots everything he sees.  He laments that nobody pays for photos of a foreign child smiling; people only want to see the monstrous: suffering and death.  I suspect a deep kinship between Edwards and Andrew.  Both men have to couch their interests in a mode that doesn't always represent those interests (for a film called Monsters, this film doesn't show off its monsters).  Look at a film like The Evil Dead, which was essentially a playground for Raimi to develop his style.  But he still made a suspenseful horror picture on top of his formal experimentation, and Edwards, while not in the same league technically (locking down the camera would be nice every now and then), carries that same mix of honoring genre and exploring what interests him.  Unfettered by the needs of a studio to go bigger and broader, Edwards made the film he wanted to make.  You can't help but root for the guy.

RATING: B+