Keep watching the skies ... and sometimes the borders

Updated: 2011-03-12 06:43

By Elizabeth Kerr(HK Edition)

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 Keep watching the skies ... and sometimes the borders

The wreckage left by the aliens dots the landscape in Gareth Edwards' low-budget and indelicate immigration allegory Monsters.

 Keep watching the skies ... and sometimes the borders

Rich girl Sam (Whitney Able) and photographer Andrew (Scoot McNairy) escape alien-infested Mexico in the hit-and-miss Monsters.

 Keep watching the skies ... and sometimes the borders

Sam and Andrew (Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy) reach the totally unsubtle border between Mexico and the United States and its infection-free zone in Monsters.

A pair of 'alien' invasion movies proves we're still terrified of each other. Elizabeth Kerr reports.

There's nothing quite like a good alien invasion to make a point about "others" among us or coming at us to get everyone thinking about who we're collectively most afraid of. The invasion story pre-dates it, but the 1950s was when the form famously came of age. Americans terrified of Communists thanks to Joseph McCarthy's witch-hunts and a general global unease at the onset of a deadly arms race were a few factors that went into a recipe for some great movies. Invasion of the Body Snatchers, The Thing, War of the Worlds, The Day the Earth Stood Still, and (duh) Godzilla are just a famous handful.

For a time, the moon landing and Stanley Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey made everything about looking out and ahead. A Body Snatchers re-contextualized for the 1970s and a more hopeful Close Encounters of the Third Kind suggested we were over the fear of foreigners. This was also the time of Watergate, Vietnam and the first energy crisis; women with jobs and disco were more troubling. But the 1980s proved there were still plenty of aliens to be wary of. The discrimination allegory Alien Nation and John Carpenter's Reagan-era consumption cult hit They Live refocused the outlander as enemy, even if the outlander came from within. Aliens were still among us and they were still great metaphor.

Even though Roland Emmerich's Independence Day almost single-handedly put the nail in the meaningful alien invasion coffin for good Cloverfield saved the day, that perfect blend of The Blair Witch Project's long shadow of mock doc tropes and the burgeoning, "If it's not on YouTube/Twitter it didn't happen" mentality that's making low-res, shaky-cam images normal cinema. The years since have seen a parade of mostly execrable alien movies that are cheapening the genre, new invasion touchstone District 9 excepted. M. Night Shyamalan's Signs was just goofy (wouldn't a superior race mortally allergic to water bypass a planet covered in the stuff?) and the recent Skyline's ineptitude defies language.

Combining Blair's you are there vibe, D9's empathetic accidental invaders and Cloverfield's camera phone aesthetic, Gareth Edwards' Monsters wants to be wholly inventive but leans toward utterly derivative. The most striking thing about Monsters (opening March 17) is how effective it intermittently is given its microscopic budget (a rumored US$500,000), handheld HD camcorder production, four-man crew, and MacBook Pro post-production. Edwards is a BAFTA-winning animator by trade and his penny-pinching creativity is in full swing. It's too bad he has zero narrative instincts.

Andrew (Scoot McNairy) is a mercenary photojournalist looking for publishing gold in the jungles of Mexico. Why? Because that's where aliens (otherwise known as unsubtle stand-ins for illegal immigrants) have landed. There's an unclear infection angle here and so when his Hearst Corporation-type boss orders him to escort his daughter back to the safety of the United States he's forced to give up his potentially lucrative quest. The daughter, Samantha (Whitney Able), is engaged, but as she and Andrew struggle through dangerous terrain and even more mercenary travel agents love blooms (yawn). As it turns out, that's what the aliens are about, too.

Monsters is the least nuanced border conundrum art produced yet and Gareth's touch is about as light as a tank. The Mexicans Sam and Andrew encounter are in tune with nature in a way soulless Americans are not (see: giant concrete wall along the Rio Grande). Nothing as insightful as the parallel between Africans and the ghettoized aliens and fear that history was repeating its injustices from D9 ever manifests here. The mystical Mexican country folk are stock caricatures that offer weary travelers tamales and ponchos and pray to the Madonna the aliens don't attack them in their retro-Aztec huts. An even better story, the one about humanity living in a post-invasion world, gets lost in the murk of star-crossed loverdom.

Then we have the $100 million Battle: Los Angeles, re-titled World Invasion for territories outside the United States-where three-quarters of the film's grosses are likely to come from, though producers have underestimated the inherent appeal in watching L.A. leveled anywhere in the world. It's the polar opposite of Monsters but every bit as clichd. The difference is that WI revels in its loud, glossy, explosion-heavy entertainment. At points it channels Speed (escape by bus), D9 (hardware-heavy leggy aliens), Assault on Precinct 13 (trapped in a, uh, police precinct) and Aliens (a relentless and innumerable invasion force) and any grunt's-eye view of the hell of war.

Director Jonathan Liebesman (The Texas Chainsaw Massacre: The Beginning) starts fast, actually squeezing out a lean, mysterious first hour, generating a good amount of tension and sense of pandemonium from a hackneyed script. A rag-tag group (natch!) of Marines must make their way back to a safe zone after a supremely strategic out-of-the-blue attack by an unknown enemy. Liebesman propels the action forward, cleverly dropping hints as to what's happening in ambient TV, radio and Internet snippets. The alien force is only seen enough to keep them threatening, and we're left to wonder what could render Santa Monica into Baghdad so fast. It's then that things collapse into exhausting rote mayhem leading to a predictable conclusion.

The script is top-loaded with scintillating dialogue like, "Go, go, go!" "Move!" and "Woo-hoo!" in lieu of character development, made moot by war movie archetypes like the traumatized vet (Jim Parrack, True Blood), the guilt-ridden former commander (Aaron Eckhart), the groom to be (Ne-Yo) and the academic soldier untested in combat conditions (Ramon Rodriguez). Not that it matters. There's no political message to relay or easily identifiable people to fear despite the dead serious tone. WI is about kicking butt, and it does a fine job of laying southern California to waste (the rubble budget must have been stratospheric). Sony is clearly concerned about the similarly themed and visualized Skyline poisoning the well, which is why it's suing Skyline's directors, who also worked on the effects crew here. WI taps nothing but our inner 13-year-old-leaving the door open for that as-yet unseen brainy invasion film. And perhaps a sequel.

World Invasion opened in Hong Kong on Thursday.

 Keep watching the skies ... and sometimes the borders

Santa Monica (actually Louisiana) does its best impression of Baghdad in the alien invasion actioner World Invasion.

 Keep watching the skies ... and sometimes the borders

Staff Sergeant Nantz (Aaron Eckhart) watches in horror as the mysterious aliens show off their superior firepower in World Invasion.

 Keep watching the skies ... and sometimes the borders

Michelle Rodriguez does her tough chick thing as Air Force pilot Elena Santos in the predictable but enjoyable World Invasion.

(HK Edition 03/12/2011 page4)