Monsters vs. Aliens

"What you doing, Uncle Matt?"

It was my three-year-old niece Sarah. She'd climbed onto the desk beside me and was looming over me, looking at the computer screen while I was typing away my reactions to Wolverine.

"I'm writing an entry for my blog," I said.

"That sounds yucchy."

"Well, it's not actually," I said. "It's about a movie."

"The movie that we just saw?"

"No it's about a different one, one that I saw a couple days ago. But I'm going to write about the one we saw today too."

"Oh."

So here I am.

I had let Monsters vs. Aliens fester in the theaters for a couple weeks, knowing I had plenty of time to get around to seeing it. Also I've learned that if I want to see movies in any of the small one-screen downtown cinemas in this area, I have to wait a couple weeks for current releases to clear out of the multiplexes. Monsters vs. Aliens was a sure bet to eventually make the rounds of these out-of-the-way venues.

But last Friday my sister had announced she wanted to get out of the house with the children, possibly for a movie. I helped her look over the listings. What was suitable for children? I said Earth was probably too predator-oriented for the little girls. Hannah Montana: the Movie? My sister vetoed that idea. The only choice was Monsters vs. Aliens, for which I was more than happy to accompany them to Entertainment Cinemas in Leominster for the early matinee. My homeschooled ten-year-old nephew came along as well.

When I think of Dreamworks animation, the first thing that comes to my mind is that there will be plenty of jokes about bodily functions. This one didn't disappoint, and there was a steady drip-drip of humorous bits about peeing, farting and belching. I tend to regard these as crutches, as ways of distracting from the essential task of cinematic story-telling, although they always make the kids laugh.

Given that, I thought the movie succeeded fairly well during the first two acts. Although it's not apparent from the trailers (except for the ones that were shown during chick flicks), the main plot is the one that follows the "ginormous" woman Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon), who is converted to a mutant on her wedding day by a glowing meteorite.

The most interesting part of the story to me was how, in the wake of Susan's sudden transformation, the U.S. military swoops in and arrests her in the most destructive manner, without ever announcing what they are doing, or under what law they have the authority to detain her. They simply take her away rudely and imprison her. There is no discussion of criminal charges, or her rights as a citizen. She is simply to be imprisoned forever.

This is balanced in a lovely way in a scene a few minutes later when a larger alien robot crash lands with the intention of retrieving the meteorite on behalf on an evil alien overlord.

Whereas the benevolent but hapless citizen is carted away without even so much as an arrest warrant, the malevolent alien robot is greeted with courteous pomp and circumstance by the President (voiced by Stephen Colbert, who all but steals the show here).

All in all, it was one of the best satirical portraits of America in 2009 that I have seen on film.

What follows is a battle between the imprisoned (good) mutant monsters (Susan included) against the rampaging robot. The showdown, which occurs at the midpoint of the movie and involves the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge, actually comes across as the climax to the story, and probably should have been so. Nearly everything in the second half of the movie felt like a letdown compared to the first half.

Why? The entire Third Act felt like a letdown because it gave way too much screentime to the four-eyed mutant alien overlord (voiced by Rainn Wilson), who is a very boring character. My attention during this part of the movie was not helped by the fact that my nephew and one of my nieces (presumably out of lack of interest) had taken to running up and down the center aisle of the otherwise empty auditorium.

Why is the alien overlord boring? Because strange mutant alien characters are always boring in animation. The only exceptions are Kang and Kodos from The Simpsons, who are kept fresh by the fact that they are used so sparingly.

On the other hand Monsters vs. Aliens way, way overdoes it, not only giving lots of screen time to the four-eyed alien, but creating literally thousands of clones of this character that fill the screen and reduce the (more interesting) monster characters to supporting players.

I've come to conclusion that strange alien creatures are a hallmark of lazy animation. My proof is that this is the fourth animated feature in the last year alone to fall back on bizarre aliens as a plot crutch. The previous three features---Space Chimps, Delgo, and Battle for Terra were all freaking disasters. All three were independently produced, and I can imagine the producers thought that using aliens was a handy shortcut, making for interesting fantasy characters to cover-up otherwise deficient stories.

Notice on the other hand that Disney-Pixar almost never uses these types of characters, and as a consequence their animated features are the cream of the crop. It simply takes far more work and creativity to bring to life Woody from Toy Story or even a robot like Wall-E, than it does to go hog wild creating floating fantasy creatures.

Dreamworks only half sucks, so only the last part of Monsters vs. Aliens fell into the lazy crapola category.

There were a few other themes in the movie that stuck out. The Postmodern examination of the enfeebled American male was in full force, as all the men in the movie follow the dichotomy of either being weakened egotistical jerks or hyper-masculinized egotistical war mongers (literally the name of one of the characters). As in many recent films, it is the task of the (sane and ego-balanced) women to cope with these reduced creatures.

The scene of the teenage couple in the car, in which it is the young woman who is aggressively trying to get her pathetic boyfriend to kiss her, is perhaps the most interesting such example. Ironically such scenes were commonplace not out of the question in the classical era, in which it was assumed that women had to chase men, but largely vanished after 1970, which is the approximate date of the sexual courtship inversion in cinema (subject for another time).

On another note, perhaps the most disturbing moment in the movie was the scene involving the destruction of the Golden Gate Bridge mentioned above. I couldn't help but feel that the formula for a disaster movie has become "let's think of famous landmark that hasn't been destroyed yet." There is something willfully barbaric about this trend, one that speaks to the dismantling and destructive impulse in Postmodern culture.

Even though it was only an animated movie, it greatly saddened me to see the magnificent structure reduced to ruins without a single note of consolation or regret from any of the characters in the movie. What a strange time we live in.

POSTSCRIPT:

"What you doing?"

"I'm listening to the radio. I wrote another blog entry---about you."

"About me riding a horsie?"

"No, about when we went to the movies."

"Oh. Can you write about me and horsie?"

"O.K., I will."

"And can you write about Maura and a horsie?" Had to get the sister in there.

"You can be sure I will."