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Monsters Movie Review

Monsters is a 2010 science fiction horror film directed by Gareth Edwards and starring Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able. It’s a very slow, but interestingly conceptualized film.

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“Doesn’t that kind of bother you,

that you need something bad

to happen to profit from it?

You mean, like a doctor?“

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It follows an American photojournalist tasked with escorting his employer’s daughter back to the United States by crossing through Mexico’s “Infected Zone” where the extraterrestrial creatures reside. It’s thus very reminiscent to ‘District 9’ in that political subplot about immigration and the US-Mexico border. That is easily my least favorite part of this movie.

What I found the best is the ending of course which is very cool and powerful. It’s monster cinema, but done in an intriguing and operatic, instead of chaotic manner. I also really liked the emphasis on drama and adventure instead of monster mayhem. The film benefits from a great attention to detail in its setting, making you want to know more about this whole situation, and that uniqueness is apparent throughout this very different, moody indie flick.

However, what really bothered me is the pace, which is simply way too slow and leisurely. It’s one thing to have a meditative, slower film, but this one ain’t that smart to pull that approach off. It’s simply concerned with this relationship drama too much when in fact these two characters aren’t all that great.

It’s a very cliched falling in love storyline with these two sharing a relationship that I have seen countless times before in a genre film, plus the stereotypically male and female roles were bothersome to me. I also found the performances from Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able both very unimpressive, though both look memorable and nice, but simply their acting isn’t the strongest in my opinion.

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Monsters is great in the alien sequences that are sparse, but thus all the more memorable. Not just the ending, but also the alien emerging from the water scene is quite powerful, and my favorite scene is the one with the alien mushrooms, that was intriguing to me as a biology enthusiast. Overall, the film looks good, but it’s terribly paced, and Gareth Edwards to me is an overrated director.

Monsters benefits from solid visual effects, a terrific use of the aliens sparingly used and an interesting, different setting well explored. It’s a moody, appreciatively unique film in its own right, but the pacing is way too slow, thus not hooking the viewers in its storyline nearly enough as it should, plus the acting performances are unimpressive and the characterization is weak.