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beccaelizabethI just watched Monsters. The film four intro was most impressed with the low low budget and how he did the FX on his laptop. I was most impressed that the FX were really not the point, they served the story well, and were just one element in a well realised world.
I nearly didn't watch it through. By my usual standards it's a total fail. Woman dies before the credits. Bechdel fail at 'two named women', though to be fair there's only two named characters. The two Americans get names, all the others don't. Plus the intermittent use of subtitles to translate the Spanish frequently puts them at incomprehensible distance. I thought it was odd, but then I realised we're in the point of view of the guy, who has very little Spanish, so it makes sense to have some but not much translated. The woman speaks Spanish, but that's pretty much all we learn about her. We also learn about her fiance and her dad, and that her dad is rich. We never learn why she's in the country or why she isn't saving her own self.
The plot hinged early on them being complete bloody idiots, so again, I nearly turned it off. It should have ended much, much sooner but she gave someone else her passport and he got drunk and robbed. How stupid is she? So she's stupid, has no motivation, is relying on this guy she only just met because her dad sent him, does everything he says even when she thinks he's being stupid (and he usually is), and gives him her passport. I disliked the character very much. It's a total rescue the princess.
Only, slight twists involved. Like, when you get to the end of the film, you realise what you saw before the title was the princess dying. This isn't the story of how they survived. This is the story of how the Americans killed them. Which puts a spin on the title. Are the Monsters the big octopus-crab-leg bioluminescent thingies? Well they certainly do their share of damage, but usually to vehicles that were shooting at them already. You leave them alone, they leave you alone. Unless the American chemical weapons have driven them a bit nuts, but even then, they left the two unarmed protagonists alone while splatting all the dudes with guns. You reach the end of the film thinking they're kind of ethical and proportionate, if clumsy, and also weirdly beautiful. They've got a beauty of an arc like that, introduced by being the big bad, then their life cycle sketched in without ever getting to technobabble, and then a really beautiful moment where you see two of them clearly for the first time and they're just big octopus dudes having their own lives. It's eye opening.
So before the title you see, maybe, heroic American soldiers fighting monsters. But the more you watch, the more you see the gas masks and hear about the bombing, the more you see piles of dead bones and candle vigils and in Spanish the slogan something like Who are the Monsters... the more you start thinking on who does the real damage.
And the specific ways the two protagonists are idiots makes a lot more sense past a certain point. They're sitting on a famous looking monument type place, staring at this huuuuuuuge great wall America built along the border, and the guy says America sure looks different from the outside. And then it's like, click, suddenly the film is not so subtle, and not so much about space aliens. They start off acting like idiots in stereotypical American tourist ways, like assuming there's room in the rules for them, and that they can wave money and get stuff, and not taking threats seriously, assuming an insulation from consequences. Also, drunk. And then it works poorly, and they lose their passports, and drag through the back ways of illegal immigrants to get to America, and then sit on the border saying it looks different from the outside. I read recently of a huge great fence built along the American border to keep the illegal aliens out. It's several kinds of ugly. And this film weren't looking subtle.
But then they get to the border... and nobody's there. It's been evacuated already. And I was also reading about how the fence has been built not actually on the border, so there's USAmericans stranded on the wrong side of the fence. They say that law enforcement treats the fence as the border now, so they're not getting the protections of being US citizens, even though they're strictly speaking on US soil. So in Monsters the protagonists get to the USA, but the border has moved, they're not protecting that bit now, they've rolled the edge back. And they're left walking for two days to even get to a telephone. And once they get there, they phone 911 and wait for help like good little citizens, and they kiss, and the Army turn up and pick them up. End movie.
... except then I skipped back to the beginning and yeah, the annoying humming guy at the start and the end was a clue, we saw the ending at the start, and it's a whole different movie than it looked. They were perfectly safe standing there watching beautiful shining creatures get together. It was even a happy romantic union moment, and their kissing matched, and it was all awwww and shiny. They just got killed by the US response.
So there's feminism fail, big surprise. But there's science fiction win. There's a world sketched in that's grubby and poor and full of scavenged machinery, but not Mad Max, just one notch up on now. There's aliens arriving in a crashed space ship but not Aliens style. And it has something to say about the USA.
I'm not planning to watch it again, but it was pretty interesting the once.
I nearly didn't watch it through. By my usual standards it's a total fail. Woman dies before the credits. Bechdel fail at 'two named women', though to be fair there's only two named characters. The two Americans get names, all the others don't. Plus the intermittent use of subtitles to translate the Spanish frequently puts them at incomprehensible distance. I thought it was odd, but then I realised we're in the point of view of the guy, who has very little Spanish, so it makes sense to have some but not much translated. The woman speaks Spanish, but that's pretty much all we learn about her. We also learn about her fiance and her dad, and that her dad is rich. We never learn why she's in the country or why she isn't saving her own self.
The plot hinged early on them being complete bloody idiots, so again, I nearly turned it off. It should have ended much, much sooner but she gave someone else her passport and he got drunk and robbed. How stupid is she? So she's stupid, has no motivation, is relying on this guy she only just met because her dad sent him, does everything he says even when she thinks he's being stupid (and he usually is), and gives him her passport. I disliked the character very much. It's a total rescue the princess.
Only, slight twists involved. Like, when you get to the end of the film, you realise what you saw before the title was the princess dying. This isn't the story of how they survived. This is the story of how the Americans killed them. Which puts a spin on the title. Are the Monsters the big octopus-crab-leg bioluminescent thingies? Well they certainly do their share of damage, but usually to vehicles that were shooting at them already. You leave them alone, they leave you alone. Unless the American chemical weapons have driven them a bit nuts, but even then, they left the two unarmed protagonists alone while splatting all the dudes with guns. You reach the end of the film thinking they're kind of ethical and proportionate, if clumsy, and also weirdly beautiful. They've got a beauty of an arc like that, introduced by being the big bad, then their life cycle sketched in without ever getting to technobabble, and then a really beautiful moment where you see two of them clearly for the first time and they're just big octopus dudes having their own lives. It's eye opening.
So before the title you see, maybe, heroic American soldiers fighting monsters. But the more you watch, the more you see the gas masks and hear about the bombing, the more you see piles of dead bones and candle vigils and in Spanish the slogan something like Who are the Monsters... the more you start thinking on who does the real damage.
And the specific ways the two protagonists are idiots makes a lot more sense past a certain point. They're sitting on a famous looking monument type place, staring at this huuuuuuuge great wall America built along the border, and the guy says America sure looks different from the outside. And then it's like, click, suddenly the film is not so subtle, and not so much about space aliens. They start off acting like idiots in stereotypical American tourist ways, like assuming there's room in the rules for them, and that they can wave money and get stuff, and not taking threats seriously, assuming an insulation from consequences. Also, drunk. And then it works poorly, and they lose their passports, and drag through the back ways of illegal immigrants to get to America, and then sit on the border saying it looks different from the outside. I read recently of a huge great fence built along the American border to keep the illegal aliens out. It's several kinds of ugly. And this film weren't looking subtle.
But then they get to the border... and nobody's there. It's been evacuated already. And I was also reading about how the fence has been built not actually on the border, so there's USAmericans stranded on the wrong side of the fence. They say that law enforcement treats the fence as the border now, so they're not getting the protections of being US citizens, even though they're strictly speaking on US soil. So in Monsters the protagonists get to the USA, but the border has moved, they're not protecting that bit now, they've rolled the edge back. And they're left walking for two days to even get to a telephone. And once they get there, they phone 911 and wait for help like good little citizens, and they kiss, and the Army turn up and pick them up. End movie.
... except then I skipped back to the beginning and yeah, the annoying humming guy at the start and the end was a clue, we saw the ending at the start, and it's a whole different movie than it looked. They were perfectly safe standing there watching beautiful shining creatures get together. It was even a happy romantic union moment, and their kissing matched, and it was all awwww and shiny. They just got killed by the US response.
So there's feminism fail, big surprise. But there's science fiction win. There's a world sketched in that's grubby and poor and full of scavenged machinery, but not Mad Max, just one notch up on now. There's aliens arriving in a crashed space ship but not Aliens style. And it has something to say about the USA.
I'm not planning to watch it again, but it was pretty interesting the once.
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Date: 2012-01-04 05:44 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2012-01-06 10:07 am (UTC)