Monsters (2010)

Monsters (2010) written by Gareth Edwards and starring Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy. I’m not sure with names like that which one is the girl and which the non girl, but whatever one it is she is hot, in a messed up Gweneth Paltrow kind of way. Yeh, I know, my age is showing with the term ‘hot.’ I suppose that maybe because she has blond hair, but there is always something sexy about someone that is blond and can speak another language, in this case Spanish, as she finds herself in the quarantined zone between the Mexican border and the Great Wall of America. And it isn’t just to keep wetbacks out, although that is probably just a dollar bonus, but to keep aliens on the Mexican side, where they can’t really do any harm because there are only Mexicans there. In the first scene we are shown these ‘Monsters,’ which is never a good idea, a bit of anticipation always works better, or even not showing them at all and let the imagination grow. But this is a movie and that is never going to happen. So the monsters are just really big squids plonked onto of some King Kong tower and I’m thinking Jesus just empty the swimming pool and walk away, but no, they start shooting rockets and planes start bombing it and, well, the plastic squid went the way of so many other plastic squids, squashed to the side of a building with tomato sauce. You can’t beat a hammy opening. But then, disappointingly, the film got really good. The play between Scoot and Whitney and the will they won’t they-and I’m not talking about getting eaten by aliens-was very well done. There was a brilliant turning point when Scoot chases after Whitney, who is on the dock and says ‘just leave,’ and she says, ‘yeh, I will, but you’ve got my passport,’ that was pitch perfect. Even afterwards the overland route into the US was riveting, but my thinking was at least one of them could have been eaten by aliens, but this isn’t Dr Who, so they lovey-doved over the border and saw the giant squids/aliens/monsters mating like a set of Christmas lights and it was an ahhhhh moment. They were human after all.