While it isn’t oft publicized, Pixar and DreamWorks have quite a little game of swapping going on that basically started right from the beginning. Need evidence? Well you know Pixar’s Toy Story and DreamWorks had a remarkably similar film in Small Soldiers. DreamWorks had Antz and Pixar A Bug’s Life. Pixar had Finding Nemo, DreamWorks Shark Tale and so on and so forth. Pixar led the monster genre with Monsters Inc. but DreamWorks had even bigger ambitions in mind when they decided to enter the game in 2009.
Monsters are good science fiction fun but then again so are aliens. Rather than choose between the two, DreamWorks wisely opted to pit them against each other in a plot that works way better than the title insinuates possible. The big gag surrounding this one in its theatrical debut was that it was DreamWorks’ first 3D motion picture (a trend that has been slowly gaining momentum of late). Of course my encounter with this one was limited to the realm of high definition LED display and the power of the BluRay so I cannot comment on the 3D effects in this critique.
The story tells of typical California girl Susan Murphy (Reese Witherspoon) is unwittingly clobbered on her wedding day by a meteor full of mysterious space gunk. The encounter results in her growing to 49-feet-11-inches tall.
As is expected in a 1950s B-movie spoof, the military jumps into action and captures the freshly mutated girl and transports her to a covert government compound where she is renamed Ginormica.
The confused and abused gentle giant finds herself placed in confinement with a ragtag group of Monsters: the brilliant insect/ mad scientist Dr. Cockroach, Ph.D. (Hugh Laurie); a fish man thawed mid evolution named The Missing Link (Will Arnet); the gelatinous and indestructible B.O.B. (Seth Rogen); and a 350-foot grub known only as Insectosaurus.
Their confinement & governmental study is cut short, however, when a deadly alien robot lands on Earth and begins wreaking havoc upon the planet. In a moment of desperation, the president thanks in no small part to the persuasion of General WR Monger (Kiefer Sutherland) decides to enlist the motley crew of Monsters to combat the Alien Robot and save the world from imminent destruction.
On the surface, it’s a pretty decent plot and honestly, the potential for depth or layered plot structure are certainly secondary considerations to the primary goal of presenting really, really impressive visuals and near-constant stabs at humor. The latter has much to do with the cast even over the writing as it was the adlibbing of Seth Rogen, Will Arnet and Hugh Laurie that manage to inspire the giggles over the in-your-face gags and comedic setups.
The textures, lighting, and rendering are simply stellar throughout (again even discounting the 3D experience) and hold up still even in this ever-advancing industry. The pacing is fairly consistent if a bit more plodding than what is considered standard fair in the kid-friendly computer animated feature film game. In fact, with a runtime of 94-minutes, the sensation that it’s a bit longer than most films of the sort is no mere illusion.
However, the film comes up a little short in the area of providing the sheer cleverness commonly found in the top entries to the CG-game. It’s got enough humorous moments and visual charm to make the experience rewarding regardless, but the potential for absolute greatness is frequently apparent.
In all Monsters Versus Aliens follows the formula that most of DreamWorks’ heavily hyped (exception Kung-Fu Panda and the Shreks) films in that a bit of structure inconsistency takes away from what could be a true top contender. It’s good fun, awesome to behold, and offers up some genuine hilarity at times. At the end of the day, that’s a resume strong enough even for a monster.
