Monsters

MONSTERS (2010) - Dec. 14, 2010
Well made and fairly impressive, given the budget, this was about a couple of Americans traveling through a Mexico in which, a few years earlier, aliens arrived and are now a part of the habitat (in "infected zones").  Writer/director Gareth Edwards does a really great job of making this seem like a real, lived-in world, and I was completely sold on the whole premise.  His direction, too, was quite good.  Not-so-good was his writing; Edwards does a fairly poor job of getting us to care about the two protagonists, though it probably doesn't help that neither of the two leads are particularly good, and lack chemistry.  Scoot McNairy, in particular, doesn't have the requisite charisma to make us care about his character, and comes off as more of a jerk than anything else (I could see someone like Ryan Reynolds making the part work).  Despite that I think the film generally works if only for the direction and the atmosphere that it manages to create; if the script and performances were a bit better, it could have been great, but as it is it's pretty good.  ***