Monday, November 8, 2010

I’ll say this about Gareth Edwards: in some capacity, he has a fruitful career ahead of him in the film business. That said, I just don’t know if it’s as a director. His new film, the highly touted DIY-monster flick, ahem, Monsters is visually, absolutely stunning, a series of set pieces that seem dragged from the portfolio of a talented photojournalist. But, quite honestly, the endearing qualities of the film end there. Monsters is a horror film that wants to be a pensive, slow-burner, a JAWS type film that forgoes massive visual effects for more subtle character development and psychological scares, but instead ends up, frankly, as a boring bit of romance squished in to a world of unseen monsters.

Review - Monsters

Six years ago a probe carrying space crud exploded over Mexico, spawning a newly discovered race of "monsters" and forced the United States and Central America to zone off the contaminated land, referring to it as the INFECTED ZONE. Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is a photojournalist forced by his powerful boss to escort his daughter Sam (Whitney Able) out of Mexico after she’s caught in a random monster attack. Things go badly, and the pair are stranded, without guide in the middle of the monster-rife Infected Zone. On paper the film, especially with the breathtaking visuals both in the advertising for the film and especially the trailers, sounds amazing - an up-close-and-personal look at a Jurassic Park-like world inhabited by terrifying oogly-booglies. Yet, Edwards falls prey to the fault of deconstruction. I’m never one to complain about a preponderance of characters over computer animation, but Edwards focuses so much on the burgeoning relationship between Kaulder and Sam, as well as the way they view this lost world they’re tromping through, that the monster movie aspect of a film called Monsters, sadly fades in to the background. Worse still, the acting chops of McNairy and Able are tepid at best, and this paired with a seemingly half written, half-improvised love story, deludes this film down to boring and overly-pensive.

What truly breaks the film down though is Edwards failure to actually bring the monsters to the forefront until the final moments of the film. Yes, we hear their pain howls, and at one point there’s even a brutal monster attack, but for the most part this is a film about two, pretty dull people, walking through a jungle. When the monsters do finally make a strangely romantic appearance in the final moments of the film, it’s far too little, far too late.

Which is sad, the world that Edwards creates (supposedly with only a laptop in his bedroom) is a beautiful one. Lush and dangerous, always teetering on the edge of ruin, Edward’s Mexico is a sci-fi jungle realistically realized. I found myself wanting a mute button at times, hoping only to absorb the ruined hotels and burnt out fighter jet shells that sprung from the dense greenery of the Central American jungle. On top of that, Edwards doesn’t back away from portraying a Mexico walled off from America as a direct allegory towards our countries back-handed viewpoint on immigration.

Instead of fleshing these points out though, Edwards focuses on his sorely lacking leads, creating a film that promises great things from him as a visual master, but never delivers on its oh so promising title.

 

Noah Sanders is the blog/news editor at Light In The Attic and a contributor at Sound On The Sound and the KEXP blog.  He also has his own Criterion-based film site, Criterion Quest.   If you'd like to contact Noah in regards to his writings here at Side One: Track One then please do so here.

- Noah Sanders -



Unless otherwise expressly stated, all text in this blog and any related pages, including the blog's archives, is licensed by John Laird under a Creative Commons License.