Okay, I give a shit about these characters. I get it, I get it, they each have what the other needs, yadda, yadda. Now where are the fucking monsters?
There is an inexcusable dearth of monsters in "Monsters." Which is shit. I've seen these road-trip-companions-morph-to-unexpected-lover scenes done a million times better in many other movies. Characterize the monsters. Yes, they are supposed to be enigmatic, and yes, the movie was made on a shoestring budget... but fuck! I cared more about the monsters in Independence Day, and they were complete and unapologetic dickheads! Mostly because I didn't learn about them from a TV in crappy hotel room that I wasn't actually retching in!
I liked the romance, I really did. But put the two of them in the south of France, and it's a much less funny remake of French Kiss. There are five minutes of Monsters, and four-and-a-half of them comprise half of the final scene. I get what the *monsters* represent, I JUST DON'T GIVE A SHIT. And why would I?
I like what they were trying to do, and I give them props for it. But it could have been done much, much more convincingly. And it's not just the effects--which were really pretty fucking amazing for what they were--or the "artistic" lack of them. It's that the monsters weren't REAL. If you're going to put this kind of romance in a monster movie, the monster shouldn't just be a symbol: it needs to be something that makes the characters realize why they need each other. Put Martin Sheen and Albert Hall on the Rio Grande, give them a dramatic kiss instead of a vengence-fueled death rattle, and there is Monsters...
Oh, and Martin Sheen has tits.
There is an inexcusable dearth of monsters in "Monsters." Which is shit. I've seen these road-trip-companions-morph-to-unexpected-lover scenes done a million times better in many other movies. Characterize the monsters. Yes, they are supposed to be enigmatic, and yes, the movie was made on a shoestring budget... but fuck! I cared more about the monsters in Independence Day, and they were complete and unapologetic dickheads! Mostly because I didn't learn about them from a TV in crappy hotel room that I wasn't actually retching in!
I liked the romance, I really did. But put the two of them in the south of France, and it's a much less funny remake of French Kiss. There are five minutes of Monsters, and four-and-a-half of them comprise half of the final scene. I get what the *monsters* represent, I JUST DON'T GIVE A SHIT. And why would I?
I like what they were trying to do, and I give them props for it. But it could have been done much, much more convincingly. And it's not just the effects--which were really pretty fucking amazing for what they were--or the "artistic" lack of them. It's that the monsters weren't REAL. If you're going to put this kind of romance in a monster movie, the monster shouldn't just be a symbol: it needs to be something that makes the characters realize why they need each other. Put Martin Sheen and Albert Hall on the Rio Grande, give them a dramatic kiss instead of a vengence-fueled death rattle, and there is Monsters...
Oh, and Martin Sheen has tits.