Made for around half a million dollars and with special effects created in the director’s bedroom, Monsters is a no-budget alien invasion movie which shows what is possible with modern technology and hours of obsessive slaving in front of a hot monitor. The result is not earth-shatteringly good but its naturalistic style, largely improvised dialogue and supporting cast of non-actors make it feel more organic and realistic than B-movie idiocy like Skyline.
The movie opens as if it is yet another ‘found’ footage film, with head-mounted cameras showing soldiers getting attacked by unseen creatures. This conceit is quickly ditch, taking the focus away from the breathless Blair Witch-lite style and showing itself to be a carefully shot, slow-paced and contemplative monster movie of a kind that is rarely seen.
The plot follows press photographer Andrew as he attempts to get back into the USA with Samantha, the beautiful daughter of his boss. The border between America and Mexico has been widened into a strip known as the infected zone where a crashed space probe brought extraterrestrial life to the planet, resulting in massive octopus things crashing about and whinnying to each in this no man’s land. The pair miss the last ferry and thus must trek through the infected zone with local guides to get home.
Monsters has a smouldering love story at its heart and rather than dealing with the initial discovery of alien life it borrows a leaf from District 9’s book by showing the way people have adapted to live in the shadow of extraterrestrial activity. It also wears its politics on its sleeve, albeit a little clumsily. The US is protected from the infected zone by a towering wall of concrete which has its real-life parallels in the current border struggle, although this is about as deep as the discussion ventures.
I watched the film before I was aware that the dialogue was largely improvised on set and in my ignorance I found it to be a little dry. Retrospectively it works well in the context of the film’s production, but the characters might have been slightly better established had they been given something a little more polished to say to us.
While District 9 turned into a bloody metamorphic mess in the third act, Monsters is much more careful. This does mean that it goes out with a whimper rather than a bang, but in a world where Hollywood churns out brief, unsatisfying rockets of movies it is nice to see a consistent if slightly dull Roman Candle from an independent source.
