Directed by: Michael Matthews
Starring: Dylan O’Brien, Jessica Henwick, Michael Rooker, Dan Ewing, Arianna Greenblatt
Available on YouTube, Amazon Prime, Google Play
Rated PG-13, 109 minutes
In an alternate universe where the pandemic never happened, modest crowds of moviegoers saw “Love and Monsters” in theaters without a care in the world. With its PG-13 rating and its story about nervous young love (set amid an apocalyptic hellscape full of giant mutant insects), the movie is good fare for a first date. You can almost imagine elbows nervously bumping into each other on the armrest, or a hand inviting itself into a neighboring popcorn bucket, while the protagonist, Joel (Dylan O’Brien), runs from bloodthirsty sand worms or fights off barnacle-crusted crabs the size of a house, all while cracking deadpan one-liners. Movies like “Love and Monsters” aren’t special—the movie’s title gives away the generic extent of its ambitions—but they have always catered to a particular audience, and served that audience’s needs well.
Dylan O'Brien stars in “Love and Monsters.” (Courtesy photo)
In this universe, though, where we stream our movies from home while theaters shutter across the country, the allure of “Love and Monsters” is noticeably diminished. On a small screen we notice the movie’s smallness, reminding us of what we could be seeing but aren’t. It’s mindless and easy, but to a fault.
At the movie’s open, seven years after a nuclear event that caused all the earth’s creepy-crawly critters to mutate into flesh-eating behemoths, humanity (or what is left of it) is hiding out in makeshift bunkers. If the survivors want to trek to the surface to scavenge for so much as an old can of food, they have to armor themselves with crossbows and shotguns. (Ah yes, the old stuck-at-home bit; what a concept!) When Joel heads out on a solo seven-day journey to find his girlfriend, Aimee (Jessica Henwick, “Game of Thrones”), whom he hasn’t seen in seven years, the rest of the crew in his bunker bid him a resigned farewell. Even ignoring the lovestruck foolishness of his journey, Joel isn’t exactly the survivalist type. “I have a pretty severe freezing problem,” he narrates after his crewmates save him from a gruesome death at the fangs of a giant ant, whose oozing maw he could do nothing but gawk at.
Joel has a self-effacing and often self-deprecating sense of humor, which Dylan O’Brien (“The Maze Runner”) overplays, dampening what are supposed to be laugh lines with his mumbling deference. Still, he’s an endearing enough everyman, beset on all sides by ridiculous problems and saved, time and time again, by even more ridiculous good luck. He encounters colorful characters along his journey, like the haggard surface-dweller Clyde (Michael Rooker, “Guardians of the Galaxy”) and his 8-year-old ward Minnow (Arianna Greenblatt, “Avengers: Infinity War”), or the frustratingly perfect Australian yacht captain, Cap (Dan Ewing, “Occupation”). And every clue and tip he picks up along the way comes back to solve a problem further down the road, the screenplay tying everything neatly with a bow. It’s a predictable movie.
Granted, the movie has its share of novelty, too, mostly in the background, giving color to the world in which this run-of-the-mill storyline takes place. In this apocalypse, the monsters that doomed humanity are still capable of having souls, and as such are designed in loving detail. Joel encounters a dog named Boy who is sentient, communicating in such direct pantomime that it would make you think there’s some secret plot revelation that will explain his intelligence, but such a reveal never comes. In the movie’s best scene, Joel converses with a miraculously preserved AI unit named MAV1S, whose LED eyes glow with cartoonish emotion as she describes the various terrible fates that could await Joel. Then her battery dies.
Even in its goofier moments, the movie feels heavy with loss—made heavier in the context of the pandemic—but it preaches a life-must-go-on attitude. If “Love and Monsters” is instructive for our present situation, it’s in the movie’s assertion that fear only dominates our lives if we let it. It reaches this conclusion easily, though, as if fear of bodily injury and illness is a distant problem, one we can leave in the theater after the credits roll. “Love and Monsters” is charming, but it was made for a different time..
Danny Eisenberg grew up in Harvard and has been reviewing movies for the Harvard Press since 2010. He lives and works in Denver, Colorado.
"movie" - Google News
November 05, 2020 at 12:31PM
https://ift.tt/366xowZ
Movie Review: 'Love and Monsters' | The Harvard Press | Features | Feature Articles - Harvard Press
"movie" - Google News
https://ift.tt/35pMQUg
https://ift.tt/3fb7bBl
Bagikan Berita Ini
0 Response to "Movie Review: 'Love and Monsters' | The Harvard Press | Features | Feature Articles - Harvard Press"
Post a Comment