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| Released: |
2010 |
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| Genre: |
MONSTER
SCIENCE FICTION
ROMANCE
THRILLER
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| Origin: |
UK |
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| Colour: |
C |
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| Length: |
93 |
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Tiny but encouraging. |
Reviewed by Chris Tookey
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Monsters is a sci-fi film which performs wonders on a miniscule budget and is a fine advertisement for the directing skills of a new British writer-director, Gareth Edwards.
It doesn’t deliver scares, spectacle or monster mayhem on the scale of a blockbuster, but the atmosphere of menace is skilfully conveyed, and the climax is a mini-triumph.
Mr Edwards’ writing skills aren’t yet as developed as his directing talents. The premise – a self-centred photographer (Scoot McNairy) becomes humanised and falls in love with his boss’s daughter (Whitney Able) as he helps her across an area of Mexico “infected” with aliens – owes a little too much to Frank Capra’s It happened One Night.
The young couple aren’t all that interesting or sympathetically written; nor do the actors have much chemistry, though off-screen they have since married.
The film’s message – that aliens may not be unlike us, and the true monsters are often human – is a shade over-familiar, and was more cogently expressed in the recent District 9.
So don’t expect a blockbuster, or an artistic masterpiece. All the same, Monsters is well worth seeing if you want to watch the first steps of a director who deserves to go far.
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