The pseudo-documentary style of the previous legend is only available in the film for less than two minutes, and most of the time it is still a regular shooting style. The film can be roughly divided into three parts, the first part tells about the encounter between the hero and heroine and the background of the story. The opening paragraph occupies a large part of the film, mainly because the director wants to describe the living conditions of Mexicans outside the quarantine zone and the emotional foreshadowing of the hero and heroine, but because the "monster", which is the main propaganda, fully appears at the beginning of the film, The audience's curiosity is almost completely lost, causing the first part to feel rather sluggish. The love between the male and female protagonists is more groundless and unconvincing. It cannot be shown that the two are in love with each other just because they went to the local night market together and flirted with a few words.
The second part is the highlight of the film, telling the story of the hero and heroine's journey through the quarantine zone. But the director is always telling this adventure from a tourist-like perspective. The hero and heroine see the monster knowing that it is an alien and shouting "what is this, what is that", which is ridiculous. The biggest surprise is the excellent photography. The director seems to be too obsessed with how to use the lens to express the ruined ruins, the desolate residents and the desolate corpses are the most beautiful and moving, but he forgot how to connect these good-looking shots to tell a good story. This is why the stills and trailers of the film look "eye-catching", but they are as boring as slideshows in the film. In this paragraph, such "viewing" shots follow one after another, and the large number of out-of-focus images is tiresome, with more than 5 close-ups of various aircraft wrecks, and more distant views of destroyed buildings. Maybe the director wanted to create a so-called "cruel poetry of the end of the world", but the result was superfluous to make people feel that he was showing off special effects and photography skills. And the real protagonist of the film, the alien monster, only appears twice in this segment, once as the monster in the lake that appeared in the trailer, and once again as the scene where the car is rolled up in the trailer. It is worth mentioning that the latter is very similar to "Jurassic Park", and I even thought I was watching a dinosaur movie for a while.
The last part is what happens after the hero and heroine enter the United States, focusing on an abandoned gas station. Here, the director has carefully crafted a dazzling climax. The original intention seems to be to achieve the double shock brought by the final spaceship take-off of "District 9" to the audience, but the result still ends in "a feast for the eyes". And the drama of the heroine avoiding monsters in the supermarket is very similar to "The Mist". This climax scene will show the alien monsters in a panoramic view. Their image design is not creative, but the food and reproduction methods they rely on to survive are a little surprising.
What "Monster" wants to tell is that the alien creatures are actually not aggressive or even have friendship and "human nature". It is only because of the unilateral "showing off" of the US military that wars occur frequently, and the hero and heroine witness the loss of Human beings and sentient alien monsters. There are a lot of metaphorical things in the film, such as the fighter jets flying in the air from beginning to end, such as the cold and wide wall separating the United States and Mexico. From this, it seems that "Monster" and "District 9" are actually talking about the same thing, but the final emotional tipping point of "Monster" is love rather than the deeper humanity in "District 9". The problem is that "Monster" "Monster" didn't handle this love at all, resulting in the clichéd kiss at the end that just didn't hold up and only made people laugh.
As the closing film of this horror film festival, I have high expectations for this film. The media has been promoting it as another shocking "District 9", plus I watched the wonderful "Buried Alive" the night before. So expectations rose to a high point. The result is of course hard to hide the disappointment. I feel that I just watched a scenery film in the alien isolation zone, and I remember those wonders only.
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