I streamed Gareth Edwards' Monsters last night, and in spite of its lazy pace was pretty impressed.  In fact, I have to say the pacing is a big part of why the film — which is technically sci-fi horror (but with a love story at its heart of hearts) — works. 


Just as Ridley Scott's first Alien was groundbreaking for both its gritty verisimilitude and the complexity of its characters (human and nonhuman alike), Edwards' Monsters gives the genre a twist that is at once obvious and elusive in its execution, and rewards the patient viewer with that moment of revelation we go to the movies for.

Of course, we sometimes forget that's why we go to the movies, because that moment of revelation is so seldom carried off.  I don't know if Monsters' moment is as great as, say, the peeling of the apple at the end of Ozu's Late Spring, but it approaches that in a sci-fi horror kind of way.

I also have to praise the casting of Monsters.  Scoot McNairy as Kaulder, the wan, wiry photographer in search of his Pulitzer Prize-winning photo, is a character in form and substance straight out of the '70s — in the same vein as Richard Dreyfuss in Close Encounters and Jaws— a welcome throwback to a time before pumped-up action stars took over the sci-fi and action genres.


The film itself owes more to John Cassavetes, Samuel Fuller, and early Jean-Luc Godard than to sci-fi masters of the universe like James Cameron.  Its scrappy, bare-bones style complements the story at its core.

The allusions to the politics of aliens, illegal and otherwise, along the Southern border is another touch that is brilliant by its obviousness (and we do live in an era when stating the obvious is often an act of courage)...


Movies like this remind me that film can still be what Raymond Carver famously called a "smal, good thing".  The audacity of making a little movie out of what has become a megabig genre is just icing on the cake.