Monsters

Gareth Edwards, who wrote and directed the film, does knowingly grapple with similar themes as Cloverfield and District 9. But it never gets so bad that Monsters’ shared interest in shaky cameras, deformed squid-like creatures and canned racial politics becomes overwhelmingly distracting. What Monsters sorely wants is a convincing human element and a softer touch when it comes to its incoherent and mostly pretentious depiction of the way the media sensationalizes and in turn creates monsters. Edwards’s handheld digital photography helps him kill both of those birds with one stone and that’s really where his ambitious parable falls apart.

In a world where aliens have crash-landed and been barely quarantined to half of the U.S. and much of Mexico, photographer Andrew Kaulder (Scott McNairy) is the equivalent of a vulture. He takes a break from snapping pics of dead glow-in-the-dark squid alien carcasses to help Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able), his daughter’s boss, evacuate to safety. Andrew starts their trip as a driven, impatient and unkind scavenger, sneering to Samantha that he could potentially be paid “$50,000 for a picture of a dead child.” He ends the film having reached a mystifying new understanding of his job via an overworked encounter with two monsters copulating after one has sucked energy from a nearby television showing footage of the military fighting squid creatures on a CNN-type channel. His transition between those two state of minds is brutally clumsy.

Edwards actively stifles the budding romance between Andrew and Samantha, which is effectively what necessitates the key change from Andrew the exploiter to Andrew the enlightened. His quick takes, chopped-up close-ups and over-edited scenes of dialogue only give McNairy and Able enough time to pose with fleeting pained looks when they really need to emote with their whole bodies their frustrated ardor for one another.

The film’s over-protective aesthetic is however effective when it comes to filming the film’s creatures. The actual monsters in Monsters thrive on suggestion and die when cast into harsh light: if you show too much, we stop caring. Too bad that concept directly clashes with the film’s central concern with the dangers of using tawdry representations of traumatic events to stand in for them. In the news, we have to see things to believe them while the opposite is true of monster movies and simplistic allegories alike.