The Director is a budget bragger
Gareth Edwards likes to brag that he made Monsters with only his wits, a dream, and half a million dollars of someone else’s money, painting it as The Little Movie That Could, raised on food-stamps and government cheese. Critics then fall over themselves to praise it or risk looking like bullies picking on the kid who can’t afford new shoes. Which they invariably did, praising how much was achieved with so little money, all the while sticking The Green Lantern on the cover, and running a twelve-page spread on the special effects in Sucker Punch. And yet despite the pocket-change budget, Monsters still flopped to the same degree as The Adventures of Pluto Nash, making less than 50% of its money back.
The trailer writes a cheque that the film doesn’t cash
The one minute and 41 second trailer shows about two-thirds of the special effects in the entire film. The trailer is moody and well-paced and scary while the film is boring and lengthy and lame. The trailer is made up primarily of the token cut-away shots of destroyed helicopters and boats inexplicably wedged into mountainsides and gas masks and marines and a hint of the aliens, only their screen time in the trailer is pretty much their screen time in the film. The rest of the film is them walking.
Repeating the illegal alien lesson
Just in case you didn’t get the message in Godzilla and King Kong, Monsters money shot scene of the two aliens mating is there to remind you that there truly are monsters in this world, and we are them. The leads watch in awe as the aliens bump uglies and we’re left to wonder why people just can’t get along (with aliens that kill Mexicans). Empire’s David Michael Brown lavished Monsters as “Intelligent sci-fi with a monster-sized heart”, because he’s deep and shit, but the film fumbles its attempt to encourage empathy with the aliens after we’ve spent the last 90 minutes seeing the mischief they’ve been up to with the killing of people and stuff.
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