Monsters - Did Sam and Andrew Die at the end?

Monsters (2010) is a different breed of alien invasion film. Launched to almost unrelenting critical acclaim, it tears up the science fiction rule book and delivers a dose of post-modern anomie while holding up a wry mirror to the notion of "Fortress America".

The film is an independent love story; conceived and delivered on a shoestring budget by the indisputably talented Gareth Edwards, it premiered to a superb reception at SXSW and launched in the United Kingdom on December 3 2010. The concept is compelling, the casting adroit and the execution impeccable. Alas, it falls a little short on perhaps the most elemental, human level: as a simple love story.

The premise is innovative: tentacled aliens have landed in Mexico and the northern half of that country has been designated a quarantine zone. We open in media res, with an alien ambush on a U.S. military convoy dramatically filmed through night vision goggles. The action then moves down to Mexico, where slacker photojournalist Andrew (Scoot McNairy) is tasked by his employer with chaperoning feisty heiress Sam (Whitney Able) to safety.

The film begins with all the stereotypes of a Mexican adventure holiday - stolen passports, tequila slams and casual sex. These could be students on a gap year, flirting with risk and excitement while secure in their escape route to the wealthy West. The aliens are a remote, brooding presence. There are echoes everywhere: in the mural artwork of children, or in fishing vessels whose mooring lines and anchors appear like alien tentacles. The unknown Other is always a pervasive, background shadow.

At night in the Mexican port the travellers witness a moving candle-lit vigil, and we realise the aliens occupy much the same place as death does in modern culture: airbrushed out of daily life, exiled to the margins as too frightening to comprehend. Yet the pilgrims are about to turn into the wilderness, and nothing will be the same again.

Andrew's flirtatious advances are unrequited by the engaged Samantha, so he spends the night with a local who steals their passports and money. As the last cruise ship sails, a dangerous overland trek home through the monster-infested infected zone is the only option.

Anyone familiar with the seven basic plots will recognise the trope of the journey, in which the physical voyage with its attendant dangers and hazards is nothing compared to the emotional journey in the characters' hearts and minds. Sam starts the journey as a wounded, broken character, symbolised by her arm is in a sling and a mammoth diamond engagement ring on her finger. She is emotionally disengaged as soon as she parts with her ring to buy passage for the overland journey. Stepping into the unknown territory, the terra nullius of the quarantine zone is symbolic of slipping the leash of her comfort zone and starting her odyssey of self-discovery.

The trip "up-country" along the river is a clever homage to Apocalypse Now and to its antecedent, the novella Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad. We see the same trope of journeying deep upriver into the jungle of the human mind. "The horror" that Kurtz recognised in the Congo was really within himself, and the savage landscape was almost the outward psychological projection of his inner thoughts. Here too the film is hinting that perhaps the real monsters lie within.

As the river unfurls itself, key plot points are revealed. Andrew is an absent father from a previous casual relationship, Sam is struggling with her role in the world and her relationship with her father. Andrew envies his friend, a stoner who studied to be a meteorologist because it’s the only job he can get wrong every day and not be fired. Just as the U.S. has failed to confront the alien menace, instead opting for evasion, containment and a wall of denial, these characters have skirted around the challenges of their own lives.

We realise that the aliens have achieved an integration and symbiosis with their environment of which the humans appear profoundly incapable. The area is literally an infected zone, as the aliens embed their eggs into trees and spawn downstream like salmon. In other words, they are natural beings. The aliens are simply breeding and behaving like animals; indeed their lowing cries mimic cattle the travellers find in the forest. We are already in a post-human age, where concrete structures and metal buildings are reverting to the jungle

The denouement, or "Kurtz moment" in the jungle, comes when the party are ambushed and a grainy, brutally realistic depiction of death is shown - hovering flies, sickening carnage (inferred but not seen) and blood stains on gas masks. The moment that Andrew lays a few flowers on the body of a fallen child is the moment his own humanity starts to return.

In the jungle the travellers find a Mayan temple - the ruins of a dead civilisation from which they view the last great effort of a dying one, the Great Wall of America that straddles the Mexican border. Like economic migrants seeking a better life, the refugees look into the citadel, realising what it must be like to live outside America and forever looking in to the magic kingdom.

Yet Fortress America, behind its wall of denial towards the tentacled aliens, has already been breached. The travellers wander through picture-postcard, white clapboard America which is already broken beyond repair. A dead monster hugs a shopping mall. The American suburban idyll is reduced to one wandering, mentally disturbed vagrant, clad in white stars and pushing a shopping cart through the empty streets. Television screens in an empty gas station portray lurid images of "the Battle for Texas". The alien invasion is clearly no longer just a Mexican problem.

The journey ends with the travellers witnessing the beauty and strange power of an alien mating ritual. The monsters are simply living, mating and breeding in a way that eludes the humans. The sight of the monsters lovemaking is the final seal on the protagonists' post-modern anomie and failure to confront. Sam and Andrew make phone calls - establishing connections like tentacles to the people they love. They kiss. The story then loops on itself; as they are picked up by soldiers. We realise that the opening scene of the alien ambush is about to repeat, and Samantha and Andrew are dead already. Paradoxically, it is the integration with their own world again - the end of their journey - that has killed them.

Monsters is a fine film, although Andrew's character - an evasive, promiscuous slacker - is hardly the stuff of which male romantic leads are made. Samantha's steelier determination, her fluency in Spanish and her quick thinking - including trading in her ring and pulling the plug on a TV screen that was drawing alien attack - are far more appealing. Even though the actors are married, in the context of the plot their romance appeared contrived. Monsters really works at the level of a grainy, visual experience with undertones that writhe and hiss like the aliens' tentacles. There have been few studies in science fiction realism this gritty, edgy and compelling since Children of Men.

The political critique of "Fortress America" is none too subtle either. We see the way that relentless 24 hour news coverage institutionalises the extraordinary. It is only when the plug is literally pulled on the news that an attacking alien draws back. The infected zone has become a permanent fact of life, just as the war against terror and the seemingly endless Middle Eastern wars have become part of the background fabric of today's world. In Paul Fussell's classic The Great War and Modern Memory, he spoke of how that conflict became part of the embedded fabric of reality and there appeared no reason why the war should end, or the front line ever move. Signs even appeared by roads saying "To the war". Like the quarantine zone here, the trenches had simply become a normal and inescapable part of the modern world. Here too the alien incursion, like climate change or crime, has simply become another problem to be managed.

The proliferation of signs, warnings and trite slogans emphasizes the permanency and irreconcilability of the problem. This is a typically restrained and American response, with evacuations, warning signs and walls. I imagine that faced with a plague of 150 meter long tentacled aliens on their borders, some other nations would have reached for the nuclear button.

In Monsters, the lead characters are the alien,or alienated, characters in this film. The real monsters are the un-confronted issues in peoples' minds. This is the real lesson that the extraordinary journey upriver into the jungle of the mind teaches them. Their journey teaches them about their humanity, and they only enjoy only a fleeting epiphany. Then it is back to the world of containment and evasion, the futility of the circulating loop - this world and the walls we build for ourselves.

(c) 2010 James Rozel. All Rights Reserved

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(c) 2010 James Rozel All Rights Reserved.