Monsters Vs. Aliens

Directors: Rob Letterman, Conrad Vernon
Screenwriters: Maya Forbes, Wallace Wolodarsky, Rob Letterman, Jonathan Aibel, Glenn Berger
Starring: Reese Witherspoon, Kiefer Sutherland, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie
Running Time: 94 mins
Certificate: PG

DreamWorks's latest animated comedy is a prime example of too many cooks spoiling the broth. With two directors and seven writers taking a crack at the script, it shouldn't be a surprise to find that Monsters Vs. Aliens attempts to hit as many audience demographics as possible and ends up being an unsatisfying mishmash of genre and style.

The story centres on bride-to-be Susan (Witherspoon) as she prepares for her wedding to egocentric local weather presenter Derek (Rudd). When a meteorite carrying the precious resource Quantonium crashes by the church, Susan finds herself transformed into a 50 foot, silver-haired monster woman. She's swiftly captured by the gruff General W.R. Monger (Sutherland) and impounded with a menagerie of other beasts - gelatinous blob B.O.B. (Rogen), Dr. Cockroach (Laurie), The Missing Link (Will Arnett) and 350 feet tall bug Insectosaurus. With malevolent alien Gallaxhar heading to Earth to recover the Quantonium, Monger unleashes the monsters to take down the extra-terrestrial invaders.

In Witherspoon's Susan, Monsters Vs. Aliens offers a spirited heroine for girls while the whizzbang spectacle is aimed at boys and the monster movie reverence is for the benefit of the older movie fan. Herein lies one of its problems - the film lacks uniformity and doesn't flesh out any of the ideas it plays with. It's clearly trying to please everyone in the multiplex crowd, but may end up not grabbing a hold of anyone. There are engaging characters in B.O.B.'s wide-eye (he only has one) charm and Stephen Colbert's President unleashes the best lines, though the filmmakers flatline a gag involving him greeting the aliens with the Close Encounters theme by morphing it into a wacky dance routine accompanied by the Beverly Hills Cop tune.

Inspired by B movies of yesteryear, Monsters Vs. Aliens is a shiny composition of spectacle and inane pop culture gags that completely misses the appeal of its low-tech ancestors. The charm of movies from Ed Wood and his ilk partly lie in their ramshackle approach and earnest awfulness. Monsters is slick, focus-grouped and too clean to boast the B-movie credentials that Tim Burton's similar throwback Mars Attacks did. Like Bolt, this movie uses 3-D to bring its story to life. Yet whereas the Disney dog movie is absorbing in visuals, story and character, Monsters excels only in look and style. The voice cast are good matches for their digital alter egos, with Sutherland's general, succeeding a long line of famous cinematic military men, barking out orders like George Patton. Witherspoon capably takes her protagonist from naïve and passive to superfeminist, but has to play it straight among a cast of more gifted comic performers.

Though Monsters Vs. Aliens is sweet eye candy, there's little magnetism in its clichéd storyline and it comes across like an episode of The Simpsons past season 10 - heart and soul are sacrificed for sequences of loud characters pinballing across the screen in search of an easy laugh. The whole endeavour is an unsubtle, in your face CG-animated assault from DreamWorks.


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