Monsters

Imagine a completely boring, bog standard monster movie. Space probe crash lands in Mexico, bringing with it a new life form, which quickly grows to incredible size and starts trashing the place. US Military steps in, shoots it a lot until the problem is contained. Blah blah. Cloverfield wrung the last out of that, and there haven't been any real advances in the genre since the 50s.

So it's a good job really, that's not the movie they made. All that standard BS I mentioned happened a few years ago. The monsters got contained in a region of Central America, and thrived. This is now an area called the Contaminated Zone, and the Mexican and US authorities vigorously defend the borders with military and airstrikes.

Cut to our protagonists, a photojournalist and the daughter of his boss. Things are getting scary down in Mexico where they are. The creatures (massive bioluminescent octopus/spider hybrids) are migrating and pushing at the borders and the father wants the journalist to get his daughter out of there. And so begins a journey through Infected Central America.

There's three things this film brings to mind for me. First, there's the obvious parallel to be drawn with the Iraq war. In that the situation is no longer remarkable for anyone involved, really. CNN are still showing wall to wall coverage of Monsters Vs Airstrikes, but nobody's paying attention, much as we'll get news reports about so many soldiers or civilians killed by IEDs in Iraq, and while we know it's not irrelevant, it doesn't grab our attention. The abnormal has become the norm, the remarkable is unremarkable.

The second thing is the existence of a well defended border between the USA and Mexico, and shady organisations of men dedicated to smuggling people across that border. Another pretty close allegory for the real world.

The final, and most interesting thing for me was that it was a little like a nature documentary, as in Last Chance To See, of late with Stephen Fry. Because as we get to see these alien creatures more, we begin to understand them more, and the nature of the problem being more similar to the introduction of European species into Australia, and the ensuing environmental impact, rather than that of some sinister alien invasion. The sense of these creatures being in some way like elephants, huge, and occasionally ornery and violent if you upset them, is very striking.

So overall, this is a film packed with the best kind of SF - a new idea which encourages you to think about things in the real world. And of course, this is just the scene in which the story is told, a road movie about two people thrown together in adversity, and making a connection, which would have been absolutely good enough to hold the movie together without the introduction of these intriguing creatures.

A warning though. When you see this film - and really, see this film - do your damnedest to see it at a time when it's unlikely that there will be any kids there. Because when I went to see it, there were a lot of young lads in there, lured in by the promise of a monster movie, and who got very fidgety with the growing realisation that all the action and explosions they thought they were going to get was all happening off camera, and what they were watching was a cross between a love story and a documentary about gorillas or rhinos.