This is the monster movie by Gareth Edwards that he shot for $15K that showed at Cannes. I believe it is available for Pay-per-View/Video on Demand and it's supposed to have a theatrical release as well. And it's worth watching!
The story: Six years after a NASA probe crashed in Mexico, Mexico and the US are struggling to contain strange, monsterous lifeforms that have begun to appear and have quarantined half of Mexico to try to contain them. Now a photo journalist is forced to escort his bosses daughter through the quarantine zone back to the US while avoiding these strange new monsters.
So how was it?
Awesome...and not so awesome.
This is a movie that definitely helps if you go in knowing it was shot for $15K. For that money, this thing is amazing. This is not a movie that looks cheap at all. The F/X and locations and monsters and cinematography are all fantastic. The actors, too are all solid. The visuals are constantly engaging and the mosters have a cool octopus/Lovecraftian feel to them different from anything I've really seen before. Unfortunately, where the movie is lacking is story.
In terms of story, this thing feels like CLOVERFIELD-lite. That's because while both movies feature big scary monsters, they really spend more time focused on the people than on the monsters. C- however, had a much stronger story for the characters -- a guy loves a girl, but things have gotten screwed up between them and right before he is going to rush out to tell her he loves her a Godzilla-like monster attacks the city, and now this guy has to rush threw a war zone-like Manhatten to try to save her before the army firebombs the entire city to destroy this monster.
Holy crap! Now that's a movie!
MONSTERS doesn't have a story anywhere close to that powerful. Here you have two people, a guy who is kind of a horn-dog and has a kid he doesn't see and a girl who is about to get married but doesn't really seem that into it. She is in Mexico near or in the infected zone (for some reason, i don't think they ever say), and now the guy has to get her to the US. Things go wrong, so instead of taking the ferry (safe) they have to venture through the infected zone. During this they seem to bond a bit, but there just isn't anything particularly powerful going on with them on an emotional level. He wants to take a great photo, but never really does anything about it and she doesn't seem that into her impending marriage, but again she isn't really against it either. I've heard a comparison to LOST IN TRANSLATION, where you have these two people who are lost in their own lives and lost in a strange city come together...except L-i-T really explored how isolated and alone those people felt and I just didn't get anywhere near that depth of feeling here.
It's a shame because this lack of character depth/emotion is the only thing keeping this movie from being a tour-de-force, just an out of the park home run. And, ironically considering how much is made for the cost of making the movie, that's a part that would have been free. It just meant coming up with a stronger, more emotion-packed story for the characters.
And it makes it interesting to compare this movie to PARANORMAL EXPERIENCE, another low budget, made out of HWood movie that became a sensation. The difference is that MONSTERS had to be made by someone with a strong background in visual F/X and that is the strength of the movie. P-E lacked that (on a technical side it could have been made by anyone), but it has a much stronger story in dealing with the characters and because of it, for me, it's a stronger film.
There are a lot of other things that didn't make sense to me, although honestly while I was watching the film it kept my interest enough that I didn't think about them.
The movie itself is an interesting contrast to PARANORMAL EXPERIENCE. That was a movie that anyone could make. There wasn't any special technical skill to the shots or F/X -- the story, concept and characters are what made it compelling. MONSTERS is visually fantastic and will definitely find a certain audience, but you'd need advanced skill behind the camera and with visual F/X to pull it off and ultimately the weakness of the story and character arc's make it hard to imagine it would find the mass appeal that either CLOVERFIELD or PARANORMAL EXPERIENCE did.
But my hat's off to the guy for getting the film made. And while for me it's not on the same level as C- or PE, it is definitely a movie worth watching.
The site Slashfilm also has a video on the making of the movie, which I haven't watched but will after I type this up. LINK
*** RECOMMEND ***
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