Monsters (2010)

• Written and directed by Gareth Edwards
• Starring
  • Whitney Able
  • Scoot McNairy
• Produced by Allan Niblo and James Richardson
• Executive produced by Nick Love and Nigel Williams

Living in the future is great. Thanks once again to the democratization of cinematic tools, even independent SF films can compete for visual impact with their studio-produced blockbuster cousins. Movies like District 9 (2009), budgeted at $30 million, and Skyline (2010), budgeted at $10 million, can legitimately compete at the box office with studio movies whose average budget is upwards of $106 million. (That’s not the average sci-fi flick or the average summer tentpole movie – that’s the average studio release of any genre or season.)

Our damsel in distress, cowering behind our knight in shining armor.

Setting the bar still higher (or lower) is Monsters, with an estimated budget of $200,000. Yes, there have been cheaper wide releases; the multiplexes seem to discover them once a decade, with phenomena like The Blair Witch Project (1999) or Paranormal Activity (2007). But both of those movies cheat, or at the very least, they rely on gimmicks to allow their obvious cheapness to be a part of the movie. (They also spawned a veritable plague of handheld camcorder flicks from enthusiastic but unskilled indie filmmakers who thought that the “found footage” rationale would cover all sins.) Monsters is part of the next wave of respectable independent SF films which don’t rely either on production method gimmickry or exploitative elements to buoy their watchability; it’s a solidly made independent film which, while it doesn’t fool anyone into thinking it’s Transformers 3, tells its story with a production confidence that had me assuming its budget to be higher than it really was by a couple of decimal points.

As title cards helpfully inform us, a U.S. space probe exploring the possibility of extraterrestrial life in our solar system crashlanded on re-entry in – where else? — New Mexico. Unfortunately, was it was carrying was indeed alien biomatter, which propagated across a swatch of land at the U.S./Mexico border from the Pacific to the Gulf, now known as the Infected Zone. Humongous walls have been constructed along both the northern and southern borders of the Zone, and the rarely seen invasive species is the target of combined American and Mexican military strikes, mainly because they are kaiju-sized critters that look like an octopus riding on a king crab.

It’s so helpful when foreign menus include pictures.

But all that’s background. Our story really begins with Andrew Caulder (Scoot McNairy), second-string photojournalist in Central America with a haircut which does not inspire confidence in his good judgment. A stray monster attack gives him a moment’s hope that he will finally be in a position to take pictures someone will notice, but the owner of the magazine he works for has a new assignment for him. The boss’s adult daughter Samantha (Whitney Able) is in the same city, and sustained minor injuries in the monster attack on a hotel last night. The boss wants Andrew to get Sam to the coast, where she’ll be able to take a ferry back to the U. S. of A.

And thus the journey of the Odd Couple begins. Sam, smokin’ hot, is engaged to be married stateside, as evidenced by the huge honkin’ ring on her finger, but somehow the thought of her impending nuptials don’t fill her with joy. Andrew has a six year old son that he only found out about two years after his birth, and seems to be trying to hang onto adolescent adventure through his choice of career even though he’s starting to realize that he’ll never make it big. Together, they fight crime! Or rather, they fight a poor transportation infrastructure!

“Does it say if they have a gift shop?”

Their train to the coast has to turn back because of monster-caused damage to the tracks ahead; they have to hitchhike to a town where they can catch a bus. Once they get to the coast, there’s only one last ferry going tomorrow morning before the military shuts down the ocean routes, and they pay $5,000 to get Sam a ticket; but Sam’s passport gets stolen by the street floozy Andrew picks up while drunk, leaving her no option but the most dangerous (and, at $10,000, most expensive) option: to bribe their way into the Infected Zone and traverse it, hoping to avoid both monsters and airstrikes.

Because the monsters are almost completely unseen save on TV screens for the first half, what we mostly see is two Americans dealing with the shaky infrastructure and even shakier ethics of Third World Central American in order to get home. The story told here gets much of its resonance from its obvious correspondences to U.S. border policy and the lengths to which undocumented immigrants will go to circumvent border security. Unbelievably, writer/director Gareth Edwards claims that any such allegory is entirely unintentional. I’m sorry, but that just sets my Fib-O-Meter buzzing. (And I’m the guy who believes George Romero when he says that all the racial subtext in the original Night of the Living Dead was accidental.) How could a movie essentially about a border crossing from Mexico to the U.S. bear no relationship to actual border crossings from Mexico to the U.S.?

“Any similarity to subtexts real or imagined is purely coincidental.”

That thread of disingenuousness aside, it’s a very convincing movie. Shot guerrilla-style with a couple of off-the-shelf digital cameras (!) and a crew of two (!!), it looks like a well-appointed independent production; composed almost entirely of handheld shots, the effect is more that of a verite-tinctured immediacy than of poverty. The script was similarly guerrilla-style, with Edwards vaguely directing the actors on the outlines of the upcoming scene and letting them ad lib their way through it. That kind of “art wants to be free” thinking can and usually is a recipe for disaster, but McNairy and Able pull it off with admirable finesse, portraying their characters with remarkable depth and quiet consistency. When Andrew and Sam start to develop unspoken feelings for each other, it’s not just the “obligatory romance” thrown into too many scripts, but a natural outgrowth of the people they are and the situation they’re in. (Even more amazing is that aside from McNairy and Able, the entire rest of the cast was simply culled from the bystanders at their unannounced shooting locations – not just extras, but solid speaking roles.)

What truly makes Monsters remarkable, though, is the rock-solid expertise with which its digital effects are deployed – both in technique, and restraint. Most of the FX can’t be detected as FX; they can only be deduced from knowing that a production of this size couldn’t deploy helicopters and fighter jets, build a wall mighty enough to keep out Kong, or place the rusting hulk of a cargo ship in the trees a hundred feet up from the edge of the water. These elements are digitally inserted, often into the background, and blend believably with the live footage. (Cannily shooting in the aftermath of a Texas hurricane to simulate the effects of an airstrike also cements a level of verisimilitude well outside the production’s budget to recreate wholesale.) Even those things which are obviously special effects, the monsters themselves, are created with weight and inertia consistent with their size, a skill which is often lacking in productions with budgets one hundred times what we see here. (The alien eggpods, attached to trees in the Infected Zone, look a little too digitally plastic to be believable, but I think give the production a pass here for good behavior elsewhere.) We’ve not only reached a point in which digital effects can be added seamlessly to location footage, but that technology is available to filmmakers functioning well below the studio budget range.

“I have this dream every time I eat sushi…”

By Nathan’s Budget-to-Entertainment Matrix, whereby one compares the dollars going into a production with the movie coming out, Monsters ends up the best genre movie of 2010 by a good ol’ Infected Zone mile.

A Notable Quotable:

“Doesn’t it bother you, waiting for something bad to happen to profit?”
“You mean like a doctor?”
- Sam and Andrew

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 8
• breasts: 0
• explosions: 6
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0