Monsters (2010)

User Review

• 

  Barneyonmovies

  7 / 10

  WHAT I LIKED: Gareth Edwards' directorial debut 'Monsters,' takes place in a quarantine in Mexico after huge, murdering aliens have arrived, and it follows a woman and a photojournalist hired by her father to get her back to America.
  
  What makes it such a great film though is the tangibility of the filmmaking which constantly has you on the edge of your seat. Edwards has talked a lot about how they shot on location in Mexico with local people rather than extras, and used handheld cameras and a lot of improvisation to make it all seem as real as possible. His camerawork within that format is properly impressive; conveying a brilliant sense of place and scale. But also, like all great creature features, we rarely see the monsters, so the tension mostly comes from the unknown with lots of signs and mentions of them alongside some smart sound design.
  
  All of that together creates a brilliant atmosphere around the simple will-they-reach-America plot, and the performances bring the jeopardy to life brilliantly.
  
  WHAT I DIDN'T LIKE: We're supposed to invest in the central couple as people, but there aren't really any character arcs to get us there.
  
  VERDICT: Gareth Edwards' 'Monsters,' is a brilliantly tense creature feature that uses incredibly tangible location shooting to portray the jeopardy and scale of its premise.

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