Beautiful Monsters

So last night I finally got to see the film Monsters, and my God was it worth the wait. A lot of the Roland Emmerich/ Micheal Bay crowd seemed to dislike this film, because it's slow and it it's a love story and there are only a couple of brief monster-related action sequences included in the entire running time. Basically, these are the exact reasons why I loved it.

Six years ago a U.S. space probe crash-landed in Mexico and soon after strange new lifeforms began to emerge from the jungles. An electrified wall was built, quarantining half of the country, and those people remaining inside the infected zone were left to scratch by, eking out an existence in a war zone.

A photographer is tasked with guiding his boss's daughter to safety after a creature attacks the place she is staying, and they are forced to journey through the infected zone to safety. Along the way they find out a lot about the monsters, each other, and finally about themselves. Ultimately, the presence of the monsters changes their lives, perhaps even making them better people. There's a subtext of illegal immigration and border control here, but underneath that the monsters represent everything that is strange and beautiful about life - they are change; they are evolution, both of the world and the people in it. These monsters are anything but monstrous as they struggle to make contact in a hostile environment.

Quite frankly, Monsters is brilliant, and I urge everyone to see it.