A lurker in the river makes itself known in Gareth Edwards’s Monsters
Chris Forrester praises the underrated early work of blockbuster filmmaker Gareth Edwards.
Before he became the face of the “almost good!” blockbuster with Rogue One: A Star Wars Story (2016) and The Creator (2023), Gareth Edwards made a name for himself with a striking pair of mega-creature features: Godzilla (2014) and Monsters (2010). In Godzilla, a top-tier outing for the cinema’s greatest movie monster and one of the most euphorically excellent American blockbusters of the 2010s, he weds a Spielbergian grace with a musical knack for tonality that rolls apocalyptic, post-anthropocene disaster movie and monster mayhem into one sleek whole. And in Monsters before it, he rehearses just about all of the evocative visual style, involving sense of scale, and economical approach to blockbuster spectacle that would make Godzilla so spectacular and everything that followed so sorely disappointing for lack of the same magic.
Godzilla needs no introduction, but Monsters does. A clear proto-kaiju movie that plays like all but a plea for Hollywood to let Edwards try again where Roland Emmerich failed, it’s about an American photojournalist (Scoot McNairy) tasked with shepherding his employer’s daughter (Whitney Able) to safety through an “Infected Zone” prowled by enormous creatures. They look decisively aquatic — wreaking havoc with squidlike tentacles that drift through the air as if underwater and stalking the land with great, spindly crabs’ legs — but their origin is extraterrestrial; some years prior to the film, a NASA probe crash-landed in northern Mexico and brought with it an alien life that has now infected the land. A border wall separates the United States from the zone, and as both American and Mexican military operations slowly fail to contain the spreading threat, a black market economy of refugee protection and transport has grown, through which our leads try (and fail) to find safe passage north.
Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able wander a decimated town in Monsters
Edwards shot the film in five countries over three weeks and with a crew of just six. Many of his speaking parts went to non-actors local to the shooting locations (many used without permission) and persuaded to act in the film, and from all of that comes a scrappy, desolate feeling that feels faithful to the experiences depicted onscreen. An early exchange sees McNairy defend himself from culpability in his profession’s exploitative gaze — it’s not his fault the people with money pay more for photos of dead children than live ones, he argues — and if not a defining one, that question becomes at least an illuminating throughline for the film’s ethos in dramatizing the experience of these people on the run as analogous to that of refugees fleeing violence for safety in the U.S. (with a conspicuous absence of the bureaucratic monstrosity of American immigration law).
It’s not an integral part of the film — this is a simple narrative more easily reflected upon with questions about catastrophes both natural and unnatural, the refugees they create, and where they may find safety — but there’s a grace to it that stems from Edwards’s general assuredness behind the camera, as well as the simplicity of his narrative. In lieu of baggy subplots, and given a simple point-A-to-point-B narrative, the film is more free to invoke real-world crises and offer the viewer room to mull on them (regardless of whether Edwards is interested or capable of coming to any weighty conclusions, the bluntness of McNairy’s early moral question at least implies a probing intent).
A rare glimpse at the beasts of Monsters
But much of the appeal of Monsters is in the sheer mountains-from-molehills success of Edwards’s budgetary constraint-defying approach. Made for a mere $500,000 (inflation-adjusted, that’s something like $740,000), it cost roughly half of even the most inexpensive of the 2025 Best Picture contenders (I’m Still Here, also shot outside the U.S.) and only rarely feels limited by the scale of its production. In part, that’s smart writing; Edwards’s focus on human characters caught in the tangle of a larger catastrophe enables him to find spectacle in more than just action. Many of the film’s most defining images are of the desolate landscapes of the Infected Zone, of sunsets viewed from refugee convoy vehicles, of armed escorts through dangerous wilderness.
More significantly, he works those limits into features, taking cues from monster-movie greats like Alien (Scott, 1979), Jaws (Spielberg, 1975), and, yes, Godzilla (Honda, 1954), where the presence of the titular creatures is felt far more expansively than in their relatively limited minutes of actual screentime. The excitement of Monsters is as much in the threat of the tentacled beasts surfacing in a river or lumbering into a crowded city as in the frantic mayhem of their attacks. And like Spielberg (though channeling Jurassic Park more than Jaws), Edwards manages to find wonder in his creature as much as terror. There’s an undercurrent of awe to the characters’ journey north that blossoms in key moments: in an encounter with the tree-growing egg sacs that give the Infected Zone its name, and later in a climactic close encounter that supplants violent spectacle with terrified amazement (it’s not lost on us that Edwards knows better than his character’s employers).
Godzilla‘s undeniable grace and sense of scale
Godzilla, then, is the work of someone who approached the genre with the right sense of purpose and pleasure and the smarts not to let a bigger budget (320 times Monsters’ scrappy funding) change his vision, a post-human masterpiece of titanic grace and masterful tonal control that dwarfs just about every American blockbuster since (and rivals the two more beloved recent Japanese Godzilla outings, Shin Godzilla and Godzilla Minus One). Where Monsters built mood and anticipation rather than doling out spectacle like Halloween candy to anchor a big world on a small story, Godzilla doubles down purely for the love of the game, and with a jubilant sense of musicality to boot.
As was controversial on its release (and maybe still is; I wouldn’t know and don’t care to), much of the film’s narrative momentum comes from grand spectacle teased and foreshadowed rather than shown. A god-sized path of destruction leads to the sea with no monster in sight; a creature hatches at a top-secret government facility and escapes before we can get much of a glimpse at it; the beast himself rises from the depths for an airport smackdown that’s promptly cut away from (and teasingly shown in television clips in the following scene). It’s not until the apocalyptic, atomic-fire-and-brimstone final passage that the real spectacle unfolds and offered to us sans cutaway, and the effect is mesmeric. And what spectacle it is, replete with all the destructive chaos promised by premise and apocalyptic tone alike, bolstered by a truly unparalleled sense of scale that makes what could easily feel like weightless digital imagery hit with the force of a hundred thousand tons of ancient beast, and grace-noted with such smartly conceived and boldly executed passages as a HALO jump into a burning city set to the same Ligeti Requiem excerpt as 2001’s Stargate sequence and a deployment of the titular beastie’s most beloved superpower for the ages. That’s all to say that for all his knack as a purveyor of the craftsmanly blockbuster, Edwards is no stranger to fun, and moreover that however contemporary the post-humanist resonances of the film are, it’s made with a timeless quality that understands the ultimate value of patience over the lousy brain-rot overstimulation of the modern action movie.
In retrospect, it’s easy to see Monsters as a test outing for a properly expensive kaiju flick, but having viewed and appreciated both films on their merits, one can recognize just how similar their successes are, and that the former stands on its own as a testament to a kind of scrappy, inventive filmmaking rarely seen anymore. In cinema’s digital age, where disaster movies can so often feel like lifeless CG and their monsters (if present) lack the tactile physicality of the men in rubber suits of yesteryear, Gareth Edwards’s wonderful pair of films defy both constraint and expectation. Regardless of the sharp drop-off in quality of his Rogue One and onward outings, there’s something purely impressive about their lean, graceful might.
Monsters screens (in 35mm!) on April 15 at IU Cinema as part of the series Beyond First Contact.