Director Gareth Edwards has shown a knack for depicting very large, very fictional things that happen to be huge in stature. In 2014, that was Godzilla, and his camera managed to make distant shots of a very familiar giant lizard look imposing and beautiful at the same time. He accomplished the same thing at times with the Death Star in Rogue One. However, he cut his teeth doing that very thing with Monsters, his feature film debut as both a writer and a director.
These particular monsters are nowhere near the scale of Godzilla or the Death Star, but they are rather impressive in their own unique way.
An opening crawl explains everything the audience needs to know about the title entities. Six years in the past, NASA detected the possibility of alien life and sent a probe to investigate. Said probe crashed into Mexico on its return trip, and not long after that, giant aliens, referred to only as “creatures” within the movie, started to overrun the area. They currently more or less control the northern third of Mexico, and both the American and Mexican militaries have had little luck doing more than maybe contain them to a “quarantine zone” near the American border. Down in Mexico, photojournalist Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy) is trying to get some pictures of a live creature–he’s shot photos of plenty of dead ones–when he is tasked with escorting his employer’s daughter Samantha (Whitney Able) back to the United States. They just need to get around the quarantined “hot zone” within a few days or else they will be stuck in Mexico for six months.
Naturally, the favored routes don’t work, and the two have to go through the hot zone to get to the border. That means hiring armed guards, moving through undergrowth that has signs that the visible creatures the military is always shooting at are not the only alien life forms in the area, and overall bonding as they do their best to avoid the most invasive of invasive species. Can they get back to the States in time?
For starters, this movie works the way it wants to. The creatures are neat to look at, appearing as some sort of giant alien squids that move around with odd flashes of light and what may be a form of communication that only they can understand. However, Edwards doesn’t show them all that often. He’s more content to show the effects of their presence than the creatures themselves. That works to build up the air of mystery, such that when the creatures do appear to attack humans or just wander by somewhere, what they are doing or what they even want is still something of a mystery. Do they only attack because humans attack them first? Are they hostile or largely oblivious? Are they even intelligent? They’re aliens in the truest sense of the word, beings of great scale that movie around and do whatever it is they do without much concern for anything else. They will defend themselves if attacked, but do they attack first to defend territory or feed or something? The movie doesn’t really say and is much the stronger for it. All that seems clear is they are quite destructive and can be quite hostile.
As for the humans, McNairy and Able have good chemistry, and Edwards resisted the urge to make Samantha some kind of spoiled rich girl. She’d been living more or less on her own in Mexico when Andrew finds her in a local hospital, and she’s the one fluent in Spanish when it comes to talking to locals. If anything, Andrew is the careless one here, and he’s more careless with other humans. And like all good sci-fi, there’s some real world concerns here. True, the obvious one is the environmental damage caused by invasive species, but one aspect of the film has aged in unexpected ways: the United States built a border wall. Will it keep the creatures out of the country? Andrew and Samantha aren’t sure when they see it for the first time on their journey north, and the movie does have an answer for that, but this is more of a movie that shows the way people adjust to unexpected problems, and for that, it actually accomplishes its goals rather well.
Grade: B+
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