The most common mistake made by first-time directors is to cram every film school trick and cutting edge idea into that debut film. A bloated, pretentious, insufferable and flashy effort is often the result. On the other hand, a great director’s first film is rarely representative of his/her full repertoire of skills and ideas. Even a master like Orson Welles, who’s debut film is hailed in most scholarly circles as the greatest film ever made, was still producing exciting cinema bursting with new ideas three decades later with experiments like “F for Fake” (1974).
If “Monsters” is any indication, first-time director, Gareth Edwards, will be dazzling audiences for years to come. Shot on less than a shoestring budget, with a cast and crew totaling only five, Edwards managed to create a fully realized post-alien invasion world more believable than the one in “District 9,” and more emotionally mature than many of Hollywood’s so-called Oscar-bait dramas.
The story kicks off six years after embryonic samples of a race of giant cephalopodic aliens were brought back to earth by a NASA probe from somewhere in our solar system. The probe crash landed in Central America and the samples began to reproduce and take over the larger part of Mexico. US and Mexican military forces were able to contain the rapidly spawning invaders in a quarantined area just south of the US border known as the Infected Zone.
Andrew (Scoot McNairy), an American photojournalist in Mexico, is called upon to escort his boss’s daughter Samantha (Whitney Able) back home to America. After their several attempts to buy their safe passage home by way of ferry are foiled, the pair is forced to make the long and dangerous trek on land through the Infected Zone.
Bucking the troubling trend of increasingly video game-like movies, Edwards supplants first-person shooter carnage with meandering calmness. The menacing creatures are gargantuan — several stories tall — but are rarely seen. Violence is encountered sparingly and is treated with seriousness. The threat of violence, however, bleeds through every frame with a chilling effect.
Just beneath the artfully crafted central relationship is a poignant and timely commentary on the absurdity that is America’s immigration policy. Edwards aggressively attacks human irrationality and the plaguing frailty that leads us to be so frightened of “the other.”
If there is a weakness in this gorgeous little film it lies in the performances. McNairy and Able have little chemistry and don’t quite possess the chops to deliver some of the film’s more weighty lines. But Edwards and his team do everything else so well it’s easy forgive minor imperfections.
It’s not often that a debut film is this controlled, intelligent and measured, making this director’s outlook more than promising.
