Netflix Minute: Monsters

Netflix Minute is a weekly feature highlighting a title from Netflix's catalog of instant view films. If you want to spend a night snuggled up with a bag of popcorn and don't want to drive to the video store, this is for you.

Science fiction uniquely provides a lens on many different aspects of life, with space operas focusing in on the ambition and perseverance of humanity or post-apocalyptic stories focusing on our universal will to survive. Lately, movies brought about a revival of soft sci-fi, diving into the anthropology and psychology of various scenarios in titles like Moon or District 9. This sub-genre is likely the most accessible to a rising filmmaker, with reports of the former film costing a mere $5 million. 2010's Monsters is one such movie, with a simple premise and a shoestring budget.

Monsters's premise is explained in the first moments on screen, telling in simple text that NASA collected samples from a possible new form of life in space six years before the beginning of the story. On the probe's reentry into the atmosphere, it mistakenly crash landed in Mexico and caused the spread of a foreign species of "creatures" that established an "infected zone" that took over nearly the whole country.

These creatures possess a more haunting than destructive presence, essentially disrupting the natural order with their bark more than bite. Unlike most "monster" movies where the threat seems so immediate it's practically crawling up the protagonist's spine, Monsters taps into that human sense of dread more familiar to horror films than thrillers. This tactic may be partly born out of the aforementioned budget, but it's affecting nonetheless.

One of the best parts of this film is the locale. Not only was the camera clearly steered to take in the landscape in the jungles and towns in Mexico, but such attention to the environment helped cement the human element to the experience. It was easy to empathize with the various townspeople the protagonists met along the way, considering the fact that they opened their doors and welcomed strangers into their house when it was clear the veil of night was anything but safe.

The aforementioned protagonists are played by Scott McNairy and Whitney Able, two actors with whom I'm familiar at a "I've seen that person before somewhere" level. Fortunately, they manage to carry the film as the only two characters of note among highly peripheral characters that exist only to keep the plot moving or show the effects of an alien invasion. The former impressed me far more out of the two, believably playing a photographer/journalist entrenched deep in Mexico whose general apathy towards anything unrelated to work is immediately tangible yet not overplayed. Able, on the other hand, plays a "poor little rich girl" who manages to get caught in Mexico at a pivotal point in her life and thus uses her situation as a cypher to contextualize her future.

When it comes down to it, Monsters proves to be a solid film with plenty of hooks for a discerning alien invasion fan like myself. Constrained by a $800,000 budget, Gareth Edwards managed to direct, write, and produce all the special effects for an original science fiction movie with a crew of five aside from the actors. Particularly under these unusual circumstances, Monsters deserves even more praise. Unless you're someone who craves the explosions and antics of a big action blockbuster, this film should definitely be a big blip on the radar.