Monsters (2010)

Written and directed by Gareth Edwards
Featuring Whitney Able, Scoot McNairy

In spite of the considerable hype that it’s generated coming out of SXSW and the L.A. Film Fest, Gareth Edwards’s Monsters is less a movie than an audition piece – it plays like a competent but uninspired rough draft for the bigger budget studio movies that the young writer-director will probably move on to in the future.

A special effects veteran with a solid sense of visual design, Edwards has tailored the premise of Monsters to showcase his strengths: in the near future, deadly aliens have landed on earth and are kept out of America by an aggressive containment policy that quarantines the aliens in a Mexican “infected zone.” After an attention-getting prologue that effectively suggests a large-scale battle between the military and the aliens, the movie scales down to follow Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a journalist entrusted with helping his boss’s daughter Sam (Whitney Able) make it to the border without becoming alien food. The bulk of Monsters then consists of the couple’s journey, which starts off on shaky dramatic ground (the treacherous route is motivated by dumb mistakes that the characters make for no other reason than to prod the creaky plot along), and only gets less compelling as it progresses.

It’s a shame, because the movie has a lot going for it, especially when compared to more anemic cinematic brethren like The Blair Witch Project and Paranormal Activity – for one thing, Edwards actually seems to have put some thought into where to place his camera rather than use the faux documentary approach of Blair Witch and Paranormal as an excuse for ignoring craft altogether. The production design in the film is consistently inventive, and particularly impressive given the film’s low budget; there are a lot of architectural details that really make the world of the movie come to life, and Edwards’ carefully chosen compositions and editing rhythms generate a palpable sense of dread in the film’s first half-hour. Unfortunately, the director forgets to populate this vivid milieu with characters that are remotely interesting, or to give them anything interesting to do. The two protagonists are painfully bland, with only a few distinguishing traits (Kaulder’s estrangement from his son, Sam’s indifference toward her fiancé) that the dialogue bludgeons into the ground repeatedly. At times it seems like Edwards is going for some kind of half-baked sense of “realism” by refusing to juice up the melodrama, but the result is that the movie just lies there on screen, inert, as we spend ninety minutes waiting for something to happen.

For in spite of the director’s obvious facility with digital effects, this is another one of those low-budget horror movies in which the monster is rarely seen and the majority of the running time consists of a build-up to a payoff that never comes. To be fair, on those rare occasions when we do see the aliens in Monsters they’re scary and genuinely convincing – in fact, they’re so convincing that one wonders why Edwards is so stingy with them. There are very few minutes of actual action, as Edwards seems to have confused stasis with suspense, assuming that the mere promise of terror is enough to hold the audience’s interest through long stretches of boredom. He might be right, but when the terror never arrives he comes off like a charlatan, albeit a far more technically accomplished one than the directors who perpetrated similar cinematic cons in Blair Witch and Paranormal Activity.

Throughout the movie there are hints at something larger and more ambitious, but Monsters only raises issues, it doesn’t explore them. The parallels with contemporary immigration debates are obvious, not that Edwards does anything with them; his political points are restricted to the obvious and the superficial, especially when compared to the similar (and vastly superior) District 9. It may seem unfair to compare Monsters to a studio-backed film like District 9, but Edwards fails to take advantage of elements that don’t cost anything; in fact, ironically, it’s in the one area where one wouldn’t expect Monsters to be able to compete with Hollywood – its effects and production design – that it holds its own. It’s the content that’s a washout. Whereas the best independent films compensate for their limited resources by providing things that studio movies don’t or can’t (greater moral ambiguity, confrontational political or emotional ideas, more explicit or unconventional sex and violence, etc.), Monsters is conceptually no more adventurous than a Roland Emmerich movie – and it’s a lot less fun (after about twenty minutes with the stupefyingly dull Kaulder and Sam, I found myself wistfully longing for the broad soap opera of 2012 and Independence Day).

Movies like Monsters – and Paranormal Activity, and Blair Witch, and to a certain extent Cloverfield – always leave me puzzled, especially after I’ve read a dozen or so other writers claiming to have been scared out of their wits by them. It’s really time to put to rest this tiresome notion that “less is more” in horror movies – that what you don’t see and what you imagine is scarier than anything a filmmaker can show you. This idea has had real staying power (I think maybe it comes from one too many directors growing up enamored of Jaws), but it seems to me a false notion, especially when one considers the fact that the best films by the best horror directors of the past three decades – Cronenberg, Romero, Craven, etc. – are hardly models of restraint and taste. Monsters, for all its technical virtuosity, is just another movie that expects the audience to do the work of scaring itself – in its own way it’s as much a triumph of marketing over content as the crassest studio remake. It certainly isn’t great cinema; after all, if less really is more when it comes to horror, wouldn’t the scariest movie ever made be a blank screen?

Rating: (2.5 out of 5):