It’s been a while since I’ve written here about a film, in fact I’ve been watching quite a lot, specially since we got cable last year but most films have not felt that much worth blogging about (although I really liked Never Let Me Go and Black Swan was certainly memorable). Anyway, we finally got to watch Monsters last night (it’d always been on the list of movies to watch but had always got beaten by something else, that’s the trouble with FilmFlex, too much choice and sometimes you can end up watching something completely dud instead, like most of Simon Pegg’s recent movies – haven’t watched Paul yet though).
Anyway, about the time Monsters had come out in the cinema, I’d seen a making off thing (it may have been a feature on The Review Show) and it intrigued me. Basically Monsters is a very low budget movie, with largely just two actors going through Mexico, most of the other actors were picked up along the way amongst the locals, CGI is then used afterwards to create the Infected Zone, with CGIed on warning signs, ruined buildings, planes, helicopters and of course monsters (aliens that had crashed to Earth on a space probe, 6 years previously). The monsters were very well done, working on the principal that the things you can’t see are often scarier and when you do see them it’s mostly dark (good for hiding any flaws in cheap CGI, as well as also being scary). The CGI was mostly very good, with the only thing that looked fake was some smoke in the background very early on in the movie and it goes to show how far technology + imagination has advanced to allow people to make things like this.
As for the plot; newspaper man escorts newspaper owner’s daughter out of Mexico and back to the US, I could get why they could only take boats back at certain times and why they couldn’t fly over the infected zone, but couldn’t she just have travelled a bit further south, got a plane to, I don’t know, Australia and then flown to the US? That’s the only bit that didn’t really ring true for me. Other than that, it was a bit of an obvious parable on Mexican immigration and Iraq / Afghanistan, but sometimes those things need saying.
