Incredible journey

Monsters is a sci-fi alien film and is being promoted as a sci-fi alien film but it’s not really a sci-fi alien film as it’s a love story with a beautiful and unexpected ending.

Monsters is a sci-fi alien film and is being promoted as a sci-fi alien film but it’s not really a sci-fi alien film as it’s a love story with a beautiful and unexpected ending. It just happens to be set in the future and happens to feature aliens, and is one of those films that was made for next to nothing — $15,000! — and yet has proved both a critical and box-office success. Fifteen thousand dollars! How is it possible? I spend that in Waitrose and still have nothing to put together as a meal for supper. How is that possible? I don’t know. It’s frightening. It may even be the most frightening thing in all this.

This is the brainchild of Gareth Edwards, a former BBC TV special-effects editor who devised it, wrote it, directed it, probably wrote the theme music and probably shops in Lidl. As far as I can see, the only significant others on the payroll — if you can call it that — are two actors and a sound man who also, apparently, had the job of scouting the area for locals to play all the other parts.

This, my darlings, is no Avatar. Its plot is as follows: it is set in 2015, six years after a Nasa sample-collecting probe bringing back extraterrestrial organic matter crashed upon re-entry into the Earth’s atmosphere, scattering its contents between southern Mexico and the USA. This area has now been declared an ‘infective zone’ as military from both countries wage a fruitless battle against enormous, rapidly reproducing creatures, which, thankfully, just aren’t that scary.