Skip to main content

Beautiful Monsters

Call it the anti-Cloverfield.

Monsters was released in 2010, on a frayed shoe-string of a budget with two unknown actors (Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy) and an intriguing premise. Six years earlier a NASA probe returned from space with some sort of fungus sample. These fungoid life-forms grow to prodigious size and wreak so much havoc in Northern Mexico that the entire border is eventually sealed, half of the country turned over to the 'monsters.' Andrew Kaulder, a photojournalist, is ordered by his boss to escort Samantha Wynden (boss's daughter) from Mexico before the "migration season" starts. Andrew, a selfish, self-involved bohemian takes a fancy to Samantha during a bender on the night before they leave. This leads to some poor decision making and the eventual loss of his and the daughter's passport. The rest of the movie follows this pair as they travel north, hoping to cross over into America through the enormous wall built to keep the monsters out.



I don't want to give anyone reading this review the wrong impression. There are monsters in this movie and they're fairly important to the overall message but do not watch this with the expectation of seeing buildings knocked over and tentacled creatures blown up. It's not that kind of movie. This is a small independent travel/romance movie that just happens to include some monsters.

Any other movie and I would have to describe in tedious detail the gun-fire, explosions, and spectacular CGI forming the bulk of the story. Instead, I can simply talk about the story. Because ultimately, while this movie isn't exactly Days of Heaven or anything it does tell a good romantic tale between two well-drawn characters. Andrew is kind of a train-wreck, an estranged father and all around cynical human being using his camera as a way to cleave himself from his own life. Samantha is also on the run, taking a tour through Central America to postpone her impending marriage. 

At one point, a guide takes the characters into the jungles of Northern Mexico (geography not one of this movie's strong suits) to see the 'extraterrestrials' living in the trees. What they find are phosphorescent mushrooms ringing the trees, living in a silent communion with the life already there. It's a strangely beautiful moment,  alien light shining on both characters, while menacing whale moans fill the jungle behind them. You get the sense of this being a kind of metaphor for love itself: intrusive, unexpected, but also part of the natural order. 


Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Reading Response to "A Good Man is Hard to Find."

Reader Response to “A Good Man is Hard to Find” Morgan Crooks I once heard Flannery O’Connor’s work introduced as a project to describe a world denied God’s grace. This critic of O’Connor’s work meant the Christian idea that a person’s misdeeds, mistakes, and sins could be sponged away by the power of Jesus’ sacrifice at Crucifixion. The setting of her stories often seem to be monstrous distortions of the real world. These are stories where con men steal prosthetic limbs, hired labor abandons mute brides in rest stops, and bizarre, often disastrous advice is imparted.  O’Connor herself said of this reputation for writing ‘grotesque’ stories that ‘anything that comes out of the South is going to be called grotesque by the northern reader, unless it is grotesque, in which case it is going to be called realistic.’ This is both a witty observation and a piece of advice while reading O’Connor’s work. These are stories about pain and lies and ugliness. The brutality that ha...
1 comment
Read more

Death's End by Liu Cixin

Having recently finished the last book in Liu Cixin's instant classic "The Remembrance of Earth's Past" series, Death's End, I can only report a feeling of total amazement and awe. There is so much about this novel that blew my mind, that offered different and better ways of viewing the universe. This novel did what I wish more novels would, serve up a new universe entire, evoking beauty and horror, nobility and disgust, in a timeless monument to unfettered speculation.  Obviously, in discussing the events of the last of a trilogy books, spoilers are to be expected. I am, however, going to try to avoid discussing much beyond the first 100 pages of the third novel. I read the translation of this novel, as ushered into being by the amazing talent of Ken Liu. Ken has written of a certain prickliness when it comes to translating work. He makes an effort not to anglicize the source material, not smudging away the occasional difficulties in bringing Cixin...
Post a Comment
Read more

With the title World War Z

Early on in the mostly disappointing zombie epidemic thriller World War Z, UN Investigator Gerry Lane (Brad Pitt) hides out in a Newark apartment, trying to convince a family living there to flee with him from the hordes of sprinting, chomping maniacs infesting the city. The phrase he uses, drawing from years of experience in the world's troubled war-zones is "movement is life." Ultimately he's unsuccessful, the family barricades their door behind him and they join the ever-swelling ranks of the undead. As far as a guiding philosophy goes for a pop-action thriller like World War Z, 'movement is life,' isn't bad. And for the first half of the movie or so, it follows its own advice. Similar to other recent zombie movies (Dawn of the Dead, Shaun of the Dead) the warning signs of what the rest of the movie will bring are subtle and buried until all hell is ready to break through. The television mentions 'martial law,' Philadelphia traffic snarl...
Post a Comment
Read more