Monster (2008)

i must have seen a different film!!

As Good As It Gets

It's funny watching the elements come together in this complicated scam. On one hand, the set-up isn't quite as complex as it seems, but there's an easy sense of fun in every exchange.

It is encouraging that the film ends so strongly.Otherwise, it wouldn't have been a particularly memorable film

Even bored on a rainy Sunday afternoon I could not cope with watching this. It's another "found footage" film, which in itself is not necessarily a bad thing - some of them can be good. This, however, was in my opinion unwatchable. A large amount of the run time had nothing discernible on screen thanks to the massive amount of camera-waggle and low light etc. I know some degree of this is part of the genre but in this it was far too much. Unless it was a dull (and often repetitive) piece to camera by one of the 2 main characters you could barely see anything and the waggling camera is enough to make you feel sick. This is one of those low budget films where almost nothing happens, when it does you don't see much (it's basically a monster movie with almost no monster at all) and it felt like a total waste of my time. I've thrown this away because I would feel guilty if someone else ended up paying any money for it and wasting 90 minutes of their life on it. It truly is awful.

The title of this movie was the scariest thing about it. Not only was the acting HORRIBLY atrocious; the script, effects, and everything made me want to kill myself! Never mind the fact that the script was both insulting to the Japanese culture, but also made Americans look like absolute brainless wonders of nature. Thank God there was a reasonably attractive heroin in the story (if you can call it that) - but even she killed it the first time her and her sister had to "pretend" to be in a Monster attacked Tokyo; simply awful. Maybe they should try singing for American Idol instead. Intensive acting school is indeed of great need for these would be starlets - as well as many-many lessons in captivating screen writing. (5 burned-out stars, is how I would rate this "monstrous" failure.)

This very low-budget rip off of Cloverfield is surprisingly well done, yet it is ultimately undone by a near total lack of plot and a complete absence of an ending. It's actually a lot smarter than the many other rip off films like this which litter video store shelves and frequently show up on the Sy Fy channel but while the effort may be admirable, the result is not that entertaining.Erin and Sarah (Erin Evans and Sarah Lynch) are a couple of American sisters who go to Tokyo to shoot their own documentary on global warming with a single video camera and some girlish gumption. While they're there, the city starts to shake. It's not an earthquake, though. What's shaking things up is a giant tentacled beast that rampages through Tokyo. Filming all the way, Erin and Sarah try to stay alive and, with the help of some Japanese folks, make it to the U.S. embassy.I wouldn't recommend this movie for too many people because it gets fairly dull after a while. I would encourage all other low-budget filmmakers to give Monster a look. That's because this film is very effectively styled. It's a much more realistic and, in some way, more imaginative take on the concept than the big budget flick it's shamelessly imitating. The quality of the video breaks up and freezes at times; the whole idea that they're going to keep filming everything is a much more contentious issue between the sisters; adding the language barrier nicely (and cheaply) complicates their situation; there's a pretty clever intimation that this isn't the only giant monster attack Tokyo has had to deal with; and there's a neat and perhaps unintentional subtext through the story about how the person in front of the camera is more freaked out while the person behind the camera is more in control, as though looking at the crisis through the lens provides a certain intellectual and emotional distance.Sadly, all of that gets crushed into a fine powder by the weight of the really sucky special effects and the fact that Erin and Sarah never manage to do or say anything at all interesting. The CGI in Monster is quite fake looking and overused. I lost count of the number of CGI aircraft seen soaring overhead, the damage to the city is represented by superimposing smoke onto unharmed buildings and the creature itself is nothing more 3 or 4 undulating tentacles that could be trying to destroy a city or simply trying to hail a monster-sized taxi. And after the initial discoveries about what's going on, the sisters might just as well be self-directed Segways that wheel from one bizarrely empty spot to another in the supposedly besieged metropolis.The end result of Monster is below average, but I give these filmmakers some credit for attempting to make something that's more than just another low-budget rip off. Writer David Michael Latt and director Erik Esterberg tried to make a legitimate movie. They failed..but at least they tried, which is more than you can say for most of the people involved in these sorts of ersatz productions.

Sisters Sarah and Erin hop the bigger pond, landing in Tokyo to film a documentary about global warming (though God knows why). In the midst of their interview with the Environmental Minister, havoc strikes. At first, it's assumed to be another earthquake. When military presence intensifies, terrorism is suspected. But all too soon, it's revealed to be...something else. Sounds a bit familiar, no? Just to get it out of the way, whether or not it's an unhappy accident of conflicting release dates, there's no getting around that this is "Cloverfield"-lite, with a few (very few) deviations. This is evident--from the distant explosion that marks the start of the action, to the overall concept, to splattering the camera with blood at least once. The monsters even roar as if they were separated at birth. To be fair, this film does have a few things on Cloverfield. The fish-out-of-water angle, namely placing the protagonists in an unfamiliar culture, was a great idea. It's difficult enough to survive disaster when most everyone speaks your language, but when they don't, the challenge is increased quite a bit. While the presentation of the global warming message is..."crunchy" at best, the not-so-subtle hint that global warming itself awakened the creature is another juicy notion. Honestly, there's no better place on earth to set your disaster than Tokyo, the world's capital of disasters! The biggest thing for me personally would have to be the logic of the beast itself. In this film, it seemed to cut its paths of destruction through heavily populated areas, as I believe an angry beast would, rather than conveniently following four scrawny twenty-somethings around, and even directly snacking on one of them, as New York's monster did.Now that that's out of the way, even if Cloverfield never existed, this would still be pretty poor. The creature, a giant squid presumably, isn't actually seen doing very much to constitute a threat. Perhaps it could have actually picked up someone or smashed something, but all we're treated to is many angles of large, waving tentacles. One thing it makes you appreciate is how difficult disaster is to write. It seems that it's very easy to get so wrapped up in the turmoil of your story that you forget how people actually talk, particularly in the midst of emergency. Sarah and Erin (their actual first names, by the way; a bright-and-shining sign of non-actors) appear to struggle on the initiative to keep many of David Michael Latt's throw-away lines out of the production, but enough of them sneak in to become distracting. "I feel like we were meant to be here...", "It's so important to document this..." Sure. I realize they would have to invent reasons for our heroines to lug around an industrial-grade camera, but there must have been another way. Call me shallow, but I believe I'd find it difficult to think of what progeny will see someday when flaming debris is exploding all around me, and the street is caving in underneath my feet.An additional note about the cast--in truth, considering the script, there's really no reason to have anyone American in it. The Japanese actors (and their characters) are FAR better than the American ones; particularly the high-schooler who lives with her half-crazed dad (and dad seems to know something of the angry creature) and the young doctor who just wants to get across town and make sure his son is okay. I wished the film were about THEM, or someone like them. Were I in Erik Estenberg and company's shoes, I'm sure I would have shot the entire thing with an entirely Japanese cast and subtitles. Couldn't the Japanese document their own disasters? They've had lots of practice.So, maybe it's not so much a ripoff as it is just not good. Of course, consider that trailer for another Asylum treat, "AVH". As in, "Alien Vs. Hunter". As in intergalactic hunters with advanced camouflage fighting slimy aliens with elongated heads and teeth. Can't wait for that one, can ya? What? You've seen it? Of course you have...