Do you know what you're going to be doing the day we make contact with an alien life form? Most likely, you'll go to work. You'll come home and make dinner for your kids. Even when everything changes, life goes on. That's the premise of Monsters, the first film by special effects man Gareth Edwards. He had some software and a tiny budget, and he used them both to create an intensely human story about what happens when our planet doesn't exactly belong to us any more.
"Everyone always says this when they come out of a big Hollywood film these days: 'I didn't really care about the characters but I really loved the effects.' That happens," Edwards told the Flick Cast. "I wanted to make a movie where you do care about the characters." He was successful.
The filming of Monsters has already lapsed into film legend. I've read the film cost $15,000, while others claim $500,000. The locations were all "real" places, and there may not have been many permits procured during shooting. The actors improvised much of the dialog during the scenes, and the extras were all hired locals. I'm not sure how much of this I believe, as it all sounds a little too perfect, but the resulting film looks wonderful. Terrible things happen off camera, and some of the most disturbing scenes simply invite us to look at wreckage and wonder what happened.
The premise: six years ago we discovered what might be life in our solar system, and a probe was sent to investigate. It broke up during re-entry, crashing to Earth, and suddenly new life forms began to show up on the US-Mexico border. A huge chunk of both countries has been specified as the "Infected Zone," and the US has built an imposing cement wall—large enough to make xenophobes blush—along the Mexican border to contain these animals.
The story follows a photojournalist in Mexico who is given the task of finding his boss' daughter and bringing her back to the United States before the size of the infected zone is increased. She doesn't seem too thrilled with his constant photo snapping of the wreckage and questions about the creatures, and asks how it feels to wait for something bad to happen to profit from it. "Like a doctor?" he asks. Her father will pay him $50,000 for a picture of a child killed by one of the aliens. "Do you know what I get paid for a picture of a happy kid?" he asks her.
This is the story of the two of them making their way back to America. A corrupt man asks $5,000 for ferry tickets, and of course something bad happens to their passports. The landscapes they pass are filled with crashed planes and flashes of violence, and TVs play snippets of battles between the creatures and soldiers. The invasion, if you can call it that, isn't the story; it's just the world these two people live in. In one inspired scene they find refuge in the home of a nice Mexican family. They drink coffee and play with the children while a cartoon shows kids putting on gas masks after spotting a creature.
We are never given much insight into the aliens. Are they intelligent? Hostile? There is a scene on a river where one seems to try to communicate using a fighter jet, and when a flash is used to take a picture, it somehow flashes back from underwater. We are never told if it's trying to attract prey or to talk, or anything else. The scene is unsettling, but not threatening. The movie features violence, but it seems undirected; the result of blundering into an animal's territory more than an orchestrated attack.
The photojournalist and boss' daughter may have chemistry, but they never fall in love. They both have families and lives, but are able to adapt to the journey through this new version of America and Mexico. We begin to realize he ran into an incredibly dangerous environment to take pictures of violence. She was... vacationing? It's never quite clear. She has the last words of the film before the credits roll, and they're a punch to the gut.
This is a science fiction movie with a little bit of horror, but the conventions of the genres are not followed. You will not jump out of your seat. What you will do is think about what happens to these people after the movie is over. My theory? Not much of anything. They go back to where they came from, and sometimes they're going to think about each other and what they saw together. Infusing a movie about aliens with a sense of wonder and friendship tinged with flirtation is no easy thing, but after leaving the theater you won't be talking about the special effects. You'll be talking about the people.
Monsters is coming to theaters on September 30, but is now available to watch via iTunes, the Zune Marketplace, and various video on demand services.
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