Monsters 2010

Before Gareth Edwards directed Rogue One, he wrote and directed this sci-fi creature feature in 2010.  It was the first feature film of his career.  He also did the cinematography, production design, and visual effects for the film.  Aside from himself only five other people worked on the film not counting the actors and it was shot in three weeks and cost around $500,000 to make.  In many scenes locals were used as extras and given outlines for plot points but no script and rolled cameras and filmed the ad libs to edit later which worked surprisingly well.  The character development and interaction is some of the better parts of the movie.  The movie did very well at the box office considering it's budget and earned over four million dollars.  The two main characters of the film are Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), a professional photographer, and Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able) the daughter of Kaulder's boss.  Kaulder is forced to escort Wynden back to the US after she is stranded somewhere in Mexico which is considered the "infected zone" after an alien invasion. 

McNairy and Able work well together throughout the movie and as their characters relationship develops the movie plots along at a great pace.  Even when the creatures are not on screen we are never allowed to forget about their presence as we are always made to feel they could show up at any second.  The creatures, in fact, end up being secondary and it feels like we are watching a budding romance road movie that also happens to have gigantic aliens around that might kill them.  They also have more to worry than the aliens there are also human monsters around who are finely disguised as ferry boat employees that continue to raise the price of a ferry ticket as the danger draws closer and closer to where they are.  Once they get to America things are not as better as they had hope it would be.

It is in the movies strengths that we find some of it's weaknesses however as due do all the time spent on the relationship building we don't see the monsters a great deal.  Unfortunately that doesn't make the times we do see the "Monsters" a special occasion either as you would think it would but for some reason it feels like it actually detracts from it.  This spells trouble for the film as we have a movie titled "Monsters" that doesn't have a lot of monsters in it.  Some may be okay with that and if so all the better for you it just felt like I needed the monsters to more than just look frightening I needed to see them do more in the film and not just see the aftermath of their invasion.  Perhaps the film needed to take place more closely to the beginning of the invasion as six years after is where our story begins making the main characters seem a little jaded with it all at times.  Perhaps the problem comes with how the movie is sold, Love In The Time Of Monsters might have been a better title for this one (of course that would have made the unrelated 2014 movie that is actually titled this to look for a new name) and alerted viewers that were seeing a love story AND a monster picture.  Of course maybe I'm just complaining too much.  I give it 2 and half giant tentacles out of 5.  The Horror Honey gives it 3 stars and claims it's a chick flick monster movie.  Maybe that's where the film really finds it's viewers and if that's the case then for that it is a huge success.  Doesn't change me grade but it helps me understand the film better.