I can’t think of a genre niche I love more than the creature feature. I’d love to play coy and take the modest, “There’s just something about them that draws me in…” route, but the truth is I know exactly why I love the creature feature: I will watch anything with a monster in it. Doesn’t matter if it was made in 1910 or 2010, doesn’t matter if it’s Peter Jackson or Roger Corman; if it finds man going up against something that is decidedly not-man, I am instantly on board.
What’s so great about the creature feature, though, is how versatile and, to use the latest buzzword in the office world, evergreen it is. Every few years monster movies seem to trend back towards popularity with a few great titles, which in turn then begins to re-legitimize the niche by making it suddenly successful. Every genre niche goes through cycles of popularity, though, so there’s nothing inherently impressive about the wheel coming back around again. What does make the creature feature so interesting to me is that filmmakers the world over have begun to completely re-invent what it means to make a monster movie.
Normally all you can expect to find is either a mad scientist who creates a killing machine by meddling with mother nature, a freak of nature on the loose, or an alien invasion. Regardless of the category, the appearance of the creature is almost always met with fear and eventual death for whoever discovers it. That’s a pretty linear and standard-issue formula, really. Over the last few years, however, people like Neill Blomkamp (District 9) and Matt Reeves (Cloverfield) have been turning the big-budget, spectacle-packed monster movie on its ear, creating in the process truly unique, independent works. But as much as I love Cloverfield and District 9, Blomkamp and Reeves could learn a thing or two from indie writer/director, Gareth Edwards.
You probably don’t recognize the name right now, but chances are you weren’t familiar with either of the aforementioned directors prior to their first films, either. People are bound to be talking about Edwards later on in the year when his debut feature film, Monsters, heads beyond the walls of its recent world premiere at the South by Southwest Film Festival. On the surface, it’s about an alternate Earth in which a crashed NASA probe has released an alien species into the Central American ecosystem. Said alien species continues to grow and grow until the United States and Mexico have had to sacrifice huge tracts of their own territory in order to create a massive quarantine zone for the alien species. Edwards’ story takes place six years after all of this hypothetically went down, focusing not on the inadvertent alien invasion that has already taken place, but on two people who wind up attempting to cross the quarantine zone on foot.
So how does Monsters re-invent the giant monster movie? By simply making the monsters, despite being the title of the film, almost irrelevant. Sure, there are still huge, lumbering giants to be seen and savored throughout the film, but the best way to think of it is in Edwards’ own terms. During the Q&A following the Monsters world premiere, Edwards’ explained that he had wanted to tell a story where, “Steven Spielberg’s movie is happening on the other side of the mountains and our duo always seem to miss the major action moments by about ten minutes.” That essentially leaves the audience with a giant monster movie that has, well, minimal giant monsters in it, a seeming contradiction given the name of the movie.
But it works. It works wonderfully. I think some people will be turned off by the combination of on-the-road love story with aliens-from-space, but I found it to be a remarkably effective and fascinating twist on what viewers would normally expect from a movie simply titled Monsters. It’s further proof that the creature feature gold mine has yet to be stripped. There are still unique and memorable ways for films to standout amongst the din of countless Syfy channel movies and festival favorites that never end up, for whatever reason, finding solid distribution.
Fortunately for genre fans, Monsters won’t go silently into the night; Magnolia Pictures saw fit to buy the distribution rights within 48 hours of it playing SXSW. And I couldn’t be happier with this news. Not only does Magnolia buying the film mean that it won’t get shafted come theatrical release time, but it also means that innovation has once again been rewarded by those with pockets deep enough to reward it. After all, Gareth Edwards wrote, directed, shot, and also did all of the visual effects on the film. To appreciate that level of craftsmanship alone I would recommend keeping Monsters on your radar; it doesn’t hurt that its approach to what defines a giant monster movie is unlike anything you’ve seen before.
