DIY sci-fi road picture romance makes good -- sort of

Aliens have infested northern Mexico when a NASA space probe crashed there. A whole big chunk of the country has been fenced off. A young photojournalist in Latin America looking for shots of the "creatures" or their human victims is ordered by his Stateside boss to accompany his daughter back to safety. Trouble over money and passports forces the pair to go right through the "infected zone." There's constant danger, not only from gauging ticket sellers and unreliable guides but from the generally unseen "creatures," who appear only rarely but when sighted are giant undulating spider-octopi, braying like elephants, or pulsating mushroom spores on trees, requiring gas masks to be worn because they infect, or may infect, the air. Meanwhile a relationship develops -- sort of -- between Kaulder (Scott McNairy), the macho, careless photographer and Sam (Whitney Able), the pouty bottle-blonde.

Monsters is a practically zero-budget sci-fi road movie with romance overtones whose odd moodiness and DIY effects have already entranced lovers of the offbeat. The young English director, Gareth Edwards, a special effects "maven," deserves credit for his ingenuity in putting together something that looks like a regular commercial wide-screen movie for only $15,000 using available Latin American settings and multiple non-actors in secondary roles along with available computer programs to fold sci-fi aliens into the mix. Whether, however, using occasionally glimpsed octypus-like loudly braying aliens as mere background for a very tenuous courtship involving not-very appealing people is a brilliant ploy or an idiotic gaffe is a question I am willing to debate. For me this film was a long slog, and originality did not equal high quality. As I'm not the first to say -- this movie has had an astonishing amount of press for something so small and still barely seen in theaters -- the cleverness and daring of the premise and the execution do not make up for writing that is careless or nonexistent. Following up on a premiere at Austin's youthful, hip SXSW festival, it's had heavy video-on-demand exposure and maybe that's a new ain't-it-cool market that's fine with something slightly rinky-dink, in fact likes it that way. There is a growing tradition that says big elaborate effects only look faker than cheap ones that let us do the imagining, just as monsters are scarier when you can't actually see much of them.

Like District 9, Monsters uses quarantined outer space critters as a heavy-handed metaphor for political exclusion, of Mexican immigrants in this case, apartheid in the other. But despite its many faults, District 9 had way more going on, exploring its society, its aliens, and its individual personalities in more detail. Monsters just gives us this young American couple. The movie is certainly never frantic or rushed; it dwells on atmosphere. That's risky with cheapo effects, though: those pauses give you time to reflect on the sheer amateurishness of it all. This is different from Blair Witch Project, which focused on its hidden menace so effectively, so ceaselessly, you never got a chance to stop and think. And it's the direct opposite of the much more kinetic Cloverfield, a movie many despised that, however, kept disbelief neatly suspended by the nonstop intensity of its vérité-shot in-your-face action.

This movie a calling card likely to get Edwards a chance to see what he can do if he has real money -- and writers and actors, maybe. In fact he's already been talking to the big box office Russian "auteur" Timur Bekmambetov of Night Watch and Wanted about collaborating for a sci-fi follow-up. McNairy (who costarred in the not-bad 2007 indie romance In Search of a Midnight Kiss) and Able (who has many credits, and many coming) are not inexperienced actors, but they don't seem to have gotten much direction from Edwards, which leads to some authenticity but more awkwardness. They do start to look really, really tired toward the end, especially McNairy. But the writing has not given them enough moments of intimacy.

And indeed though all the scares and exhaustion we see them go through makes us sort of forgive them, Sam and Kaulder remain, as one critic has said, "annoying, shallow people." She is cold and spoiled. He has no commitment to anything other than snapping lots of pictures in hopes of getting one her father will pay him a good price for. When she won't go to bed with him, he gets drunk and sleeps with a local woman who robs him of their money and passports on the eve of a crucial ferry ride. He screws up, big time -- and never quite gets a chance to redeem himself. The failure of the couple to interact in a meaningful way is the weakness at the core of the action of Monsters.

But there is raw talent here and there are plenty of good little moments. The camera is often well used. It's amusing to see how Edwards creates his "infected zone" just with some fake TV footage, a lot of weathered-looking signage in Spanish, soldiers in uniform patrolling streets, helicopters overhead (who paid for them?), folk art billboard murals (the aliens have been around for six years), gas masks, a few maps, wrecked military vehicles, and a trek through a segment of Galveston, Texas ruined by Hurricane Ike. There are two good sequences. The first is when Kaulder and Sam are led through the jungle (or the woods anyway) by a motley crew out of the last segment of Coppola's Apocalypse Now. Too bad the time around the campfire is when we are given little Basic English messages about how walls keep people in as well as out. All the messages in this film are simplistic and annoying. Finally, the couple has made it to the edge of the US and is holed up in a big deserted gas station when they are terrified, then bemused, to see a pair of the giant wispy flowing critters up in the air over the gas pumps kissing or hugging or something, and they're inspired, finally, after a long 90 minutes, to kiss. Corny as it sounds, it's a pretty magical moment.

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©Chris Knipp. Blog: http://chrisknipp.blogspot.com/.