The film was devised, story boarded and directed by Gareth Edwards, who also worked as the visual effects artist. Allan Niblo and James Richardson of Vertigo Films work as producers on the production. The filming equipment cost approximately $15,000, with the budget coming in at under $500,000.The film was able to be made on such a low budget due to the use of prosumer cameras to capture digital video rather than the more expensive 35mm film. Any settings featured in the film were real locations often used without permission asked in advance, and the extras were just people who happened to be there at the time.
Edwards had the idea for the film while watching some fishermen struggling to haul in their net and imagining a monster. He had the idea to make a monster movie set "years after most other monster movies end, when people aren't running and screaming, but life is going on" and "where a giant, dead sea monster is considered completely normal." He pitched the idea to Vertigo Films, and they asked Edwards to watch a film called In Search of a Midnight Kiss which starred Scoot McNairy and had been made for $15,000. As the chemistry between Edwards's two characters was so important, he wanted a real couple, and luckily McNairy's then-girlfriend (and now wife) Whitney Able is an actress, and joined the project.
The film was shot in Belize, Mexico, Guatemala, Costa Rica and Texas in the United States, over three weeks. For about 90% of the filming the crew comprised seven people transported in one van: Ian Maclagan (sound operator), Jim Spencer (line producer), Verity Oswin the Mexican 'fixer', Edwards, a driver, and Able and McNairy, the stars. As the low-budget production didn't run to a camera dolly, Edwards made do by sticking the camera out of the van window, cushioned on some bundled-up clothing.
As most of the extras were non-actors who were persuaded to be in the film, their action was improvised. "As a result of all this random behavior, the idea of scripting the film went out of the window. Instead I had a loose paragraph describing the scene with just the main points that had to be hit; how the actors carried this out was left up to them." Each night during the shooting period, the editor Colin Goudie and his assistant Justin Hall would download the day's footage so the memory sticks could be cleared and ready for the next day's filming. While new footage was being captured, the previously captured footage was being edited back at the hotel in which the production team was staying.
Back in the UK, Edwards had over 100 hours of unique, ad-libbed footage (rather than repeated takes of scripted scenes) to edit into a coherent film. Edwards did all the special effects himself using off-the-shelf Adobe software, Zbrush and Autodesk 3D Mask. The first assembly was over four hours long, but this was trimmed to 94 minutes after eight months of editing. Once the film was locked, Edwards had five months to create all 250 visual effects shots, a process he undertook in his bedroom. "[I was] churning out about two shots a day, which was fine until I got to the first creature shot. Then suddenly two months went by and I still hadn't finished a single creature shot; it turned out to be the hardest part of the whole process." Due to time constraints, the sound effects had to be produced before the special effects were undertaken. Edwards claimed that the advances in computer technology in recent years made it possible for him to create the films visual effects on such a low budget; "You can go in the shop now and you can buy a laptop that's faster than the computers they made Jurrasic Park on".
Monsters has been widely, and with good reason, compared to Neill Blomkamp's apartheid satire District 9, which also imagined extra-terrestrials in a post-awe spirit. These dirty, ramshackle creatures were just another species of the dispossessed, to be feared and hated by the white overclass. Edwards's movie imagines that Nasa received news of alien life out in the galaxy, sent up a space probe to recover some of its seeds and spores, but that the returning craft crashed in Mexico, where the aliens came to grow and roam, turning that entire nation into a bio-hazard zone. Could the panicky US authorities have deliberately allowed the alien-bearing spacecraft to crash down Mexico way, thus keeping the yucky immigrant aliens well out of American territory? Either way, the situation is now a Swiftian cartoon: the rich nation fearing its poorer neighbour. It is here that photojournalist Kaulder, played by Scoot McNairy, finds himself on assignment, snapping the aliens and their human victims. He is furious to be ordered to "babysit" his boss's beautiful, vulnerable daughter Samantha (Whitney Able), accompanying her through the ultra-dangerous alien zone to the US border. Inevitably, their relationship begins to change. The chemistry between these two characters, as expressed by Edwards himself was purely based on the actuality that they are a married couple in real.
Edwards went for the jungles of Mexico, Guatemala and Belize to tell his tale of two Americans crossing through an infected zone, six years after tentacled aliens, with a fondness for wrapping themselves around fighter planes, took up residence.
Photographer Andrew (Scoot McNairy), who admits he can get $50,000 for a picture of a dead child and nothing for a live, smiling one, is charged with escorting his boss’s shellshocked daughter (Whitney Able) safely across the US border. There’s a will-they-or-won’t-they romantic element that Edwards keeps dangling. Neither is particularly sympathetic.
What’s waiting for them at home isn’t security but further doubt, making the movie a rejoinder to the consoling structure of a War of the Worlds, whereby aliens appear, wreak havoc and leave us hugging our families. Here, they linger, and despite skirmishes in the mist, their main function is to tell us something about ourselves.
Although calling Monsters a sci-fi film isn't quite right, it's more a romantic road movie that just happens to have aliens in it. Think a cross between Cloverfield and Before Sunset and you're somewhere close.
A few years in the future, much of Mexico is under quarantine after a NASA probe crash-landed and released giant octopus-like lifeforms. With a huge wall separating the country from the US, a photojournalist is instructed by his boss to get his daughter back across the border and to safety.
Although calling Monsters a sci-fi film isn't quite right, it's more a romantic road movie that just happens to have aliens in it. Think a cross between Cloverfield and Before Sunset and you're somewhere close.
A few years in the future, much of Mexico is under quarantine after a NASA probe crash-landed and released giant octopus-like lifeforms. With a huge wall separating the country from the US, a photojournalist is instructed by his boss to get his daughter back across the border and to safety.
However, what you’ll remember most about the movie when it’s over, though, are the performances of Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able, a real-life couple playing two people who have never met before the story begins. McNairy is Andrew Kaulder, a photojournalist for a major news publisher (called New World, wink wink) who gets a call while finishing up a job in Mexico: He is to escort his boss’ daughter Samantha (Able), who’s been vacationing in the region, back to the U.S., where she is soon to be married. That’s easier said than done, since a large part of the country has been walled off for the past six years, ever since a NASA probe crashed there bearing extraterrestrial stowaways. Now, enormous, tentacled creatures roam the quarantined area, requiring travelers south of the “infected zone” to take ferries to America. It wouldn’t be a movie if things were that simple for Andrew and Sam, who eventually find themselves forced to make the trip directly through that zone, traveling by boat, car and on foot through jungles and up rivers with the help of assorted strangers.
While it’s in the nature of a movie like this that its central duo will inevitably face problems and obstacles from the start of their journey, Monsters doesn’t succumb to predictability. The complications are never quite what we think they’ll be, and Edwards keeps the tension humming by subverting expectations at numerous turns. Also by keeping the monsters largely offscreen—which is not really a tease, since we get a pretty good look at one in the opening sequence, which helps us imagine that they’re lurking just out of sight in any number of moments later in the story. Eventually, one of the giants does take center stage, in a scene that’s chilling and awe-inspiring—and, once again, doesn’t pay off the way you might anticipate it will.
Throughout, McNairy and Able are wholly believable as two people navigating their way through a perilous situation, and in the midst of the suspense, Edwards finds time for plenty of quiet moments allowing the audience to get to know them better as they get to know each other. The spectre of potential romance raises its head, of course, and it’s handled gracefully by both the characters and the filmmaker. Despite Sam being engaged, we wind up wanting these two to wind up together in the end—in part because that means that both will have survived.
Monsters has a few concerns in common with District 9 (set as it is in a region from which “aliens” frequently trek into the U.S.), but it’s not nearly as overtly political. Mostly, Edwards utilizes the Mexican settings (actually shot largely in Guatemala, Belize and Costa Rica) for their unfamiliarity, and the same goes for those locals pressed into service as performers, who add much to the overall authenticity, as well as moments of humanity and humor. The jungle locations are both beautiful and foreboding, and the final reels play out amidst a landscape of startling, evocative desolation. Monsters may not be a consistent scarefest, but it engages the emotions so well that its frightening moments, when they do arrive, are all the more potent.
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