Just who are the monsters here?

‘We have learned now that we cannot regard this planet as being fenced in and a secure abiding place for Man; we can never anticipate the unseen good or evil that may come upon us suddenly out of space’. — H G Wells

This sentence, from Wells’ The War of the Worlds, published in 1898, has, since the 1950s, served as the template for a sub-genre of science fiction films—the alien-invasion movie. Notable examples include: The Day the Earth Stood Still (1951), It Came From Outer Space (1953), Invasion of the Body Snatchers (1956, remade in 1978, and re-remade as the inferior The Invasion in 2007), Earth versus Flying Saucers (1956), Independence Day and Mars Attacks (both in 1996), Men in Black (1997), Men in Black II (2002), and the superb District 9 (2009);  not to mention the attempts made at bringing that particular classic of Wells to the silver screen—the first in 1953 by Byron Haskin, and the next, an adaptation that came out 52 years later, helmed by a certain Steven Spielberg. The recently released Skyline (2010), and the upcoming Cowboys and Aliens (2011) starring the dynamic Ford-Craig duo and Battle: Los Angeles (2011)  make it apparent that screenwriters and directors are not yet ready to forsake this once-fertile sub-genre.

What is also common to almost all these aforementioned films is that in each case, the aliens seem to have a particular agenda—a hostile takeover of planet Earth. It seems we have all but forgotten that Wells had, in his writing also mentioned the words ‘unseen good’. It is true that Gareth Edwards’ Monsters (2010) does not delve into that particular aspect of an alien invasion; at the same time, it would not be incorrect to state that he has portrayed a scenario that makes the sub-genre almost come full-circle—back to The Man from Planet X (1951), where the visitor from outer space was not a belligerent foe but a benign extraterrestrial.

Six years prior to the incidents depicted in Monsters, we are told that NASA discovered alien life on Europa, one of Jupiter’s 63 moons. A deep-space probe was sent to Europa, which, however, crashed over Mexico during re-entry. Since then, new life forms have begun to appear in and around the area, so much so that half the country had to be quarantined as an ‘infected zone’. While the US and Mexican military are on continuous vigil against the ‘creatures’, a huge man-made wall has been erected at the US-Mexico border, while tall fences try to keep the tentacled aliens out of civilian-inhabited areas.

Our male protagonist, Andrew Kaulder (Scoot McNairy), is a photographer working for a magazine. Posted at San Jose, Central America, his intentions of following the story of his life suddenly faces a roadblock, when he is asked by his superior to take on a completely unrelated assignment—to escort the magazine’s owner’s daughter, Samantha (played by McNairy’s real-life spouse Whitney Able) to the US border. Thus begins a journey that will take the two of them through the dreaded ‘infected zone’.

The landscape is littered with evidences of large-scale destruction. Buildings have been turned into rubble, helicopters have crash landed by the road, an aircraft and a tank are seen sunk in water, and there are cars on trees. Curiously, amidst this bleak scenario, Sam and Andrew—as alien to each other as the creatures they fear might attack them anytime—start to drop their individual guard slowly but gradually, and begin to learn more about one another.

At the same time, they start gaining knowledge on the towering, tentacled tormentors. They are told by the group of armed men who are accompanying them to the US border that the creatures are amphibians—they stay mostly in water, crawl up to the land at times, and lay eggs in trees. They are also told that ‘If you don’t bother them, they don’t bother you’. Similar to the visitor from The Man from Planet X, who only turned violent after being confronted by an evil scientist, the creatures in Monsters are known to attack only when they are fired upon.

With a budget as low as $800,000 (some mention it to be even lower, at $500,000); a meagre three-week long shooting schedule; location shooting for the entirety of the film in Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica, and Texas; and while helming the quadruple responsibility of director, writer, production designer and special effects, the Brit Gareth Edwards has taken a route diametrically opposite to his American counterparts like Michael Bay. Just as Andrew and Sam, while standing at the US-Mexico border stare at the gargantuan wall and realise that there are not many occasions when Americans get an opportunity to look at their country ‘from the outside in’, Gareth, too, wonders at our penchant to shut out what we do not understand because we immediately reckon it to be threatening.

For those of us searching for it, there is an obvious political subtext to the film—that of immigration, but there are two other aspects that make this road movie nestled inside a sci-fi fascinating. One is that the aliens, unlike the overwhelming majority of their ilk that has been depicted on celluloid, are completely without an agenda. In fact, they are trying as hard as us to survive on this unfamiliar planet. And second is how the fact that the overarching theme that humans and the creatures are two life forms that seem to be unable to understand each other is reflected in the story of Andrew and Sam. They started off as strangers, and when they understood each other, they understood the ‘monsters’, too.

It is indeed an irony that we are sending signals to outer space in search of intelligent life forms, but have this penchant for shutting out anyone or anything that does not seem to conform to our preset notions, views, and perspectives. It is communication that broke the mental fence that Sam and Andrew had erected between themselves. But the US military did not follow suit, while dealing with the creatures. They opted to open fire instead, thereby vindicating the words of another doyen of science-fiction, Isaac Asimov, who had asserted in Foundation, ‘Violence is the last refuge of the incompetent.’