intertribal (![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png)
intertribal) wrote2011-03-03 10:52 am
intertribal) wrote2011-03-03 10:52 am
Monsters (2010)
Some people have commented on the seemingly heavy-handed politics of Monsters - the issue of border-crossing and the Wall and of course, Mexico being an "infected zone" that must be kept at bay - and the most awkward lines of dialogue are the ones that try to straight-forwardly discuss the idea of America building walls and sealing itself in, and how different America looks from the other side of the Wall, and we "forget all this" when we're in our "perfect suburban homes." But that's extraneous stuff that's not at the heart of the movie. Monsters goes beyond any current political issue. It's really about coexistence/extinction/evolution, and the possibility of understanding an alien that isn't a humanoid little big-eyed bugger but looks like Cthulhu.
Serious kudos to the decision not to make these aliens totally horrific, by the way. They do kill people, but for them it must be like swatting at flies, and they do other things besides kill - they hang out in lakes with fallen aircraft, they moan plaintively, they lay their pretty glowing eggs in trees that the U.S. military then chemical-bombs, they turn off televisions, they communicate with each other through gentle touch and look like ethereal, celestial beings.
It's sad that people have said nothing happens in this movie - I'm guessing because aliens aren't popping out every other minute and having fist fights with the main characters - because the movie shows that a great deal has happened since the alien-carrying space probe landed in Mexico and North America is continuing to change. It's a bottom-up movie, which means we don't see the U.S. president frowning over the situation with his cabinet, and we don't see people living in underground shelters or totally extinguished or anything - because this is about how life went on in Mexico after the aliens landed. One of my favorite bits was a five-second clip of a Mexican info-cartoon for children showing a happy little Dora-the-Explorer-like girl putting on a gas mask and standing in front of a wall, behind which a googly-eyed, unthreatening squid monster dances around. Those kinds of details make Monsters remarkable.
A Mexican port official explains that if you have money, you take the ferry to the U.S., bypassing the alien-infested infected zone, and if you don't have money, then you "go by land." Third-world-first-world relations continue pretty much as they always have, with passport drama and bribe drama and "why do your friends have guns" drama, as an industry of illegal infected-zone crossing has developed. In a lot of ways Monsters is more of an "Americans trapped outside America!" movie, but it's a Grade A example of that subgenre, neither making things unrealistically easy or unrealistically hard, and not making it about Evil Dangerous Mexicans threatening the Poor Innocent Americans. But then there are moments where the movie rises above that subgenre - when the leads find an ancient pyramid that's been grown over by jungle, for example, leading you to wonder if our civilization will also be overtaken by these new lifeforms. But who can say? What little we see of the U.S. implies that the American people have an inflated, confused perception of the aliens' threat level, because they don't have to deal with the aliens on a daily basis. But the people of Mexico have been living within spitting range of the infected zone for six years now (the wall protecting the U.S. from the infected zone is made of brick, and the one protecting Mexico from the infected zone is more like a very tall fence), and they're not going to leave because their work is here, their family is here, as a taxi driver explains. They've also started to pick up some things about the aliens' life cycle and behavioral patterns, and the aforementioned friends with guns explain that if you leave them alone, they'll leave you alone - this doesn't quite work out because there's so little bridge of understanding between the "creatures" and the humans, but these scenes of altered, adjusted life - after the running and screaming is over, as the director says - is really what I watch sci-fi for, and Monsters hits this out of the park. I bought this world. Detailed, believable, and intense. Nothing like the ridiculousness of Avatar.
Also sad are the comments I've read saying this is just a relationship movie. I don't even know what to make of those comments, honestly. So many sci fi movies feature heroes with love interests, but I doubt anyone said that Transformers was a relationship drama. The two leads develop a bond that can't be consummated, because she's engaged. Is it because they have actual conversations and think about their lives? It's not as if the action stops so that they can stare into each other's eyes. It's baffling to me that anyone could think there was too much relationship drama, but sort of reminds me of a couple discussions in SF/F lately about how if you include a sex scene or too much relationship stuff then a book somehow jumps out of SF/F and becomes romance - yet another "issue" that I cannot wrap my head around (does that mean Updike wrote romance? it's laughable, the obsession with formulas that some SF/F fans have).
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I totally want to see this, now.
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What if something, either an alien life form or some magical thing or something--something that seemed not intelligent at first but that acted in ways that seemed to indicate *some* sort of intelligence--came along and was, say, some sort of a pest (like, caused crops to fail, or mildew in houses, or made livestock get sick)... and then people try to think how to respond, and maybe they try some typical extermination ploy, and then there's some kind of payback....
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<a href="http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSymbiote"The Symbiote</a>?
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The Symbiote (http://tvtropes.org/pmwiki/pmwiki.php/Main/TheSymbiote)?
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--only, I'm supposed to be writing this novel and I'm already vacationing from the novel with a quickie short story.
Maybe I just hate my novel....No! I don't hate it I don't think It's just haaaard....
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We streamed it onto my computer.
I *loved* the details of daily live in Mexico--the exact ones you pointed out--and I loved that alien dance at the end, by the gas station (and how the guy and girl were drawn to them--that was marvelous).
It really was a believable post "event" movie; it's exactly how I imagine things would be if such a thing happened.
I don't think I loved the film quite as much as you, though, just because I didn't like the main characters quite as much as I wanted to. I felt as if their personalities wavered; I didn't really understand who they were. But maybe I'll say more by e-mail rather than blab on here. I'm definitely glad I saw it; I liked their journey a LOT.
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Anyway, short version: sf/f movies are the only ones that can really show a changed world, and so few of them take advantage of this/do it well - so I really appreciated Monsters for that reason. Land of the Dead, which I just bought, is a good example of a zombie movie that does this. I should write about that one.
I didn't love the main characters either, but I'll say that they pissed me off less than most sf/f characters. At least they weren't college students on spring break :P
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Yes, I really, really loved the believable, matter-of-fact new reality that the movie established.
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Honestly, the movie was excellent, but could have been so much more if they tacked another 20 minutes onto the end. They set up this scary world of infection, paranoia, and this sinking sensation of "Oh Boy, we are really screwed" and just let it end. I'm not saying they needed to pull a War of the Worlds, but it felt like 2/3 of the story was told.
I guess it's better that I was left wanting more than less.
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In my mind, Pitch Black was one of these movies that did the Monsters right. It wasn't so much about defeating them, like in Alien, but surviving them. The ending of Monsters was just too open, with that Eureka! moment tacked on with the TVs.
My ending would have probably been a downer for the country, but I would have hooked the two protags up and had them start off together in this new world, trying to make sense of things. So, there would have been that light at the end of the tunnel.
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That's funny, because I was infinitely glad they didn't actually get hooked up, because I honestly think that would have destroyed what the movie was going for. It would have made it triumphant and all-about-the-protagonists and getting-what-you-want and this movie was very anti all those things. I loved that this movie had the cojones to not give its protagonists what they wanted, which was exactly where the remake of War of the Worlds, at least, (not the original, so much) went wrong.
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The army guys swooping in was a little meh for me. But honestly, I was expecting them to get gunned down for being "infected" like I've seen in other movies, so at least there was that.
I absolutely loved how the poor folks in Mexico were just living with the monsters, just another part of life, while this wall had been built to keep them out. Just brilliant stuff.
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