Fridae

Monsters is a deeply satisfying, creative and intelligent science fiction thriller that just teaches the runaway hit District 9 from a few years ago a lesson or two. It is an inspiring example in what you can do with a low budget and a lot of imagination.

In a world of space operas and slam-bang action fests passing for sci-fi, Monsters offers truly authentic fare in the realm of speculative fiction: it takes a fairly real possibility for life elsewhere in the universe and follows it to its logical conclusion, while sidestepping every possible science fiction cliche on the way.

Cambridge intellectual Simon Conway Morris recently said that if intelligent alien life existed, it probably does not have good intentions for humankind; rather, it desires interstellar domination. Yet such a worldview vastly overestimates the universal applicability of humanity’s model of conquest and domination. This movie premises that extraterrestrial intelligent life may simply be just like any other member of the animal kingdom we find here on Earth. Aliens need not be organised under a government or a tribe, they need not possess unique weaponry, or evolved consciousness, or supernatural savagery. They may just operate, like most animals do, on a level basically incomprehensible to human minds, perhaps just driven by a desire to survive and reproduce.

In this movie, mankind discovers the possibility of alien life and ships back DNA samples from Europa, one of Jupiter’s Moons, in a space probe that by crashing into somewhere on the US-Mexico border, creates a zone where aliens spawn rapidly and very soon become a perceived threat. The combined government efforts of the US and Mexico to contain the alien threat soon turn the area comprising of parts of the American Southwest and Northern Mexico into an “infected zone” through which travel is forbidden. Planes and boats connect the US and Mexico, though for a price you may travel through the infected zone under experienced guides and guards, which is however, especially dangerous due to the alien infestation there.

However, the canvas the movie paints on is much smaller, with the aliens being relegated to the background of a road trip featuring a highly appealing yet unusual odd couple. Our odd couple are Andrew Caulder (Scoot McNairy) and Samantha Wynden (Whitney Able), two Americans stuck in the Central American nation of San Jose. Caulder is a rakish, yet somewhat socially awkward photojournalist who deems to capture acclaimed photos of dead children, and sweet-natured Samantha is his boss’s daughter and newspaper heiress. After mixups with hookers and conmen practically rob Caulder of most of their valuables, the two have to head back to America through dangerous “Infected Territory” under the protection of some possibly shifty Latino gunmen, who might well be bandidos in their spare time. Such plot territory well worn by many road trip pictures as well as Westerns but as the movie unfolds, you find out what a marvelous journey, so different from the others, you will be taken on.

The happy fact about this movie is that none of the cliches you might expect happen, none of the turns you expect to take place happen, and in no case, unlike District 9 for example, does the movie ever resort to easy violent solutions or soulless spectacle as the film drifts into unexpected realms of literacy. There is a trace of Conrad’s Heart of Darkness and for that matter, Coppola’s Apocalypse Now, for example, in the boat trip that the protagonists take upriver and find boats flung into vegetation, their steel husks rusting, or the scene where the two protagonists stand amid Aztec ruins while looking out at a massive wall built on the Texas-Mexico border, both structures perhaps reminder of the shared vanity of every civilization’s unwavering belief in its own intransience. There is also something of Cormac McCarthy in the scenes where the gunmen reflect lyrically on their precarious condition caught between the bombings of the United States and the possible aggression of the alien creatures, and in the bombed out Texas ruins in the Evacuation Zone the protagonists find themselves, their only other companion a babbling, somewhat insane homeless person.

The ending of the film is a small masterpiece of irony and juxtaposition with the first scene, and even filled with a sly sense of humour on its own. It’s a completely satisfying resolution that goes along well with the rest of the film, a testament to Monsters as a film with the rare courage of its convictions.