Features Creatures: LOVE AND MONSTERS and MONSTER HUNTER

Love and Monsters is a post-apocalyptic creature feature lark with the tone of a PG-13-ized Zombieland. But Dylan O’Brien is no Jesse Eisenberg, if you catch my drift. When he, looking as he does like his photo should be in the Abercrombie and Fitch catalog, jokes about not being in shape, or affects an aw-shucks shyness of an in-his-head loner, it doesn’t exactly land. Nevertheless, the movie just doesn’t give him the scaffolding to be convincing, so I won’t place all the blame on his shoulders. The movie has this weightless, airless, derivative bent that never sparks to life. Maybe the problem is the tone, a light la-di-da hand-waving the end of the world as we know it that lands differently today than it would’ve, oh, thirteen months ago or so. It kicks off with a jokey expositional voice over that quickly lets us know that, some years before the start of the story proper, radioactive chemicals rained down on our planet and turned all the bugs and lizards into big monsters. Watching a chart fill up the loss of 95% of the world’s population hits a bum note for how it is glossed over and shrugged off. Oh, well. We pick up with O’Brien, having spent several years in a bunker where everyone else is a couple. He misses his pre-apocalypse girlfriend (Jessica Henwick) and decides to trek across the monster-filled land to find her hideout. This takes him through a variety of episodic encounters with said monsters—drooling mega-ants, massive frogs, towering snails—and a survivalist (Michael Rooker). Director Michael Matthews, in his Hollywood debut, gives the critters a slick look — somewhere between cheap 50’s B-movie chintziness and Spiderwick Chronicles YA semi-real gloss — and serves up Brian Duffield and Matthew Robinson’s slight screenplay with rote professionalism. But it also reminds one of so many other, similar, better movies, that it’s never more than underwhelming.

Even simpler, yet easily more satisfying, a monster movie is writer-director Paul W.S. Anderson’s Monster Hunter. It’s a spare, stripped-down, no-frills, effective and efficient tale of action and survival. Anderson has always been expert at making more out of less, building out suggestions of baroque worlds and staging plots of sincere simple genre vision. Once again starring his wife Milla Jovovich — the capable anchor of his flagship franchise, Resident Evil — this new based-on-a-video-game fantasy actioner finds a military unit searching the desert for a missing platoon when, zip-zap-zoom, an other-worldly lightning storm sends them to an alien landscape. There they must battle enormous creatures — swarms of enormous spiders laying gross parasitic egg sacks, or gigantic gnarly lizards of one dinosaur variety or dragon-like others — and find a way to get back home. That’s really all there is to it. Jovovich’s soldier makes a quick study, adapting her combat to fight back the beasts, getting an assist from a mysterious monster hunter (Tony Jaa), whose lengthy getting-to-know-the-interloper sequences play out like John Boorman’s Hell in the Pacific was transposed to a pulp sci-fi paperback’s painted cover. Eventually, we circle back to the sand pirates (led by Ron Perlman, whose gravely voice, stony face, towering physique, and earnest affect are always perfect for this sort of thing) who made an appearance in the cold open, as the line between this world and ours grows perilously thin. The hectic monster battles are fun, and Anderson knows his way around quickly sketching an immediately understandable nonsense world. The picture is a neat, short, economical little big movie that’s exactly what it promises and no more.

Spaced: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY VOL. 2

A moderate blast of novelty was what Guardians of the Galaxy brought to the Marvel formula with a soundtrack of needle drops and a tone as breezily goofy as the characters it introduced (a cornball lead, a stoic green lady, a hyper-literal lug, a talking racoon, and an ambulatory tree man). This allowed the movie to build considerable affection, despite succumbing to all the worst tendencies of hectic, anonymous destruction in its protracted climax. So it was surely too much to hope Vol. 2 could have the same sense of unexpected. (The only thing that beats the sudden blast of “Come and Get Your Love” in that film’s opening is probably the trailer’s memorable use of “Hooked on a Feeling,” fitting for a multi-tentacled franchise whose films are always also advertisements for itself.) But what Guardians Vol. 2 has going for it is being the rare Marvel Cinematic Universe production that mostly consists of what works best about these pictures. Going light on overlong CGI slugfests and interlocking self-importance, this one is all about the likable characters, eccentric performances, pseudo-psychedelic visual atmosphere, off-kilter semi-Shakespearian sci-fantasy pulp family drama, earnest sentiment, a dusting of sarcasm, comic book splash pages and punchlines, topped off with screwball fizz.

In fact, for those of us who prefer these behemoths at their lightest, most frivolous and goofy, this one starts with payoffs and just keeps returning on that investment. Sure, it gets dragged down at its most static with long sequences of characters marveling at each other’s squabbles and petty exposition – worst is a living planet who walks us through tableaus of his life that are hollow visualizations where an evocative monologue would do. But when it works it works, a buzzy blast, a popcorn entertainment happy to be a good hang. Who cares if Chris Pratt (Star-lord) isn’t much of a dramatic performer and Zoe Saldana (Gamora) has the thankless task of scowling and posing while slathered in dull green makeup? The rest of the ensemble is crackling, from the good-natured single-minded Drax (Dave Bautista) to the chattering racoon Rocket (voiced by Bradley Cooper) to a dancing sapling (cooing voice-modulated Vin Diesel) to the bit parts made into meals by the appealing likes of Michael Rooker and Elizabeth Debicki. Best is Kurt Russell playing pure swaggering charm as what we soon learn is a literal manifestation of ego run amok. They’re all having fun goofing around in special effects, knowing they can go big and silly without upstaging the multicolored save-the-universe lightshow splattering around and behind them. 

There’s hardly anything to it, but writer-director James Gunn stages it with some visual panache, more confidently maneuvering the Marvel house style into interesting curlicues of delight and surprise. There’s an opening action sequence set almost entirely in the background of a shot focused on an oblivious adorable little guy dancing to ELO. (Predictably, but still successfully, the movie is set to greatest hits from any AM oldies station.) There’s a whistle powered arrow zipping around a ship, its trailing red laser beam allowing us to see its progress Family Circus style in the back of slow-mo frames and, later, through a massive, askew bank of security monitors. The whole movie is nothing but goofball details – a race of golden humanoids who pilot a hive of drone attack ships from a command center that looks like the palace of Versailles had an 80’s arcade; an antennae-wiggling empathic bug lady (Pom Klementieff) who tries her best but smiles in an unhinged grimace; a god whose self-justification for abandoning his family hinges on a close reading of the lyrics to “Brandy (You’re a Fine Girl).” 

It adds up to a good time at the movies, with lower lows that a great many of its franchise compatriots. (Its highs are also lower, but what are you going to do about it?) There’s still not much of a story going on here, and for all its zipping around and moments of dramatic import the impact is gentle and borderline forgettable. But the fizz and fun are good in the moment. Perhaps that’s the MCU’s biggest success. Barely any of these feel quite enough because they’re perfectly calibrated to leave you happy but wanting more.

Galaxy Quest: GUARDIANS OF THE GALAXY

Though hardly finished with earthbound heroes like Captain America and Iron Man (and Thor, whose realm is Earth-adjacent), Marvel has opened up a new wing of worldbuilding far removed, in distance anyway, from the cinematic Avengers space we’ve come to know. Trading in superhero tropes for standard space opera stuff (you’ve seen bits and pieces in Star Trek, Star Wars, Farscape), Guardians of the Galaxy finds a ragtag group of intergalactic misfits who spend the runtime gradually learning to work together and earn the moniker of the title. It’s often fun, but it also proves Marvel Studios is happy making good movies, but has little interest in making great ones. They’re too homogenous for that. This one goes to the other end of the universe and finds on its variety of alien worlds a plot that moves and sounds much like any other movie in their roster. It has brightly proficient images, appealing goofiness, and personality that disappears once the obligatory CGI chaos takes over.

In typical Marvel Studios fashion, the characters are intriguing and well cast, then swallowed up once routine effects explode and collide around them for far too long. Before then, though, it’s charming to meet a dopey space pirate (Chris Pratt), a likable underdog as the rare human in these distant parts, having been abducted by aliens as a child. He’s after an orb that’ll get him big bucks. Too bad that a rogue green warrior princess (Zoe Saldana) wants the orb as well, and a pair of bounty hunters – a talking raccoon (Bradley Cooper) with anger issues and a sentient tree (Vin Diesel) with only three words to his vocabulary – are after him. They all get thrown in a maximum-security space jail where they meet a hilariously literal red-and-grey brute (Dave Bautista) who joins them when they soon escape in order to keep the movie moving.

They are a likable ensemble working sarcastic asides and zippy punchlines for all they are worth. The group gets drawn into the cosmic MacGuffin chase for the orb, a haphazardly formed team of mercenaries caught between the galactic government and blue-skinned baddies bent on smashing solar systems or something. I don’t know what the villains are up to, other than growling at each other and trying to blow up anyone who gets near them. Good thing the heroes set about making things right through the usual clamor. If you think the strife and conflict won’t make reluctant allies fast friends, you’ve never seen a Marvel movie. At least director and co-writer James Gunn and screenwriter Nicole Perlman seem aware of the best aspects of these things: the odd asides and strange half-campiness in the margins. For a while, Guardians is built almost entirely out of them.

This is a movie that contains humanlike aliens in every primary color, robot prison guards, a deadly glowing purple stone, a whistle-powered arrow, and a deep space mining colony built in the enormous skull of a long-dead cosmic being. It also has a collection of character actors (from Benicio Del Toro to Michael Rooker, Glenn Close to John C. Reilly, Djimon Hounsou to Lee Pace) putting on funny wigs and funnier accents. Aliens tend to speak in British accents – years of genre fare taught us that – but this movie adds backwoods roughneck drawls, airy Euro lilts, and one that sounds exactly like a pleasant, amiable John C. Reilly. Wigs, on the other hand, come in pompadours, elaborate braids, and beautiful baldness. It’s a treat for fans of scenes dense with sci-fi bric-a-brac and actors swanning around having a fun time being there.

And so, with a solid cast and decent goofy sci-fi appeal, the movie gets by on charm and mood, with a relaxed approach to escalating tension by contrasting it with the ensemble’s prickly group dynamics, snappy banter, and appealing personalities. Smart aleck dorkiness sits next to obliviousness of an alien kind. It’s cute. The raccoon gets a little annoying – mostly for the pinched voice Cooper’s attempting – but the Guardians of the Galaxy are charmers. If all the film is intended to do is put out good vibes – an oldies soundtrack played off a literal mixtape doesn’t hurt – and introduce characters for a new franchise, it gets the job done in the standard slick, bland Marvel house style. It’s new sights and fresh faces shot, edited, and mixed like what we’ve seen before. Gunn brings to it his typical queasy mix of tone as displayed in his horror movie Slither and awful dark vigilante comedy Super. He wants us to think Guardians is both serious and silly, with chaste plotting dusted with out-of-place vulgarity, with bloodless bloodshed both joke and hurt. A rough fit, but it’s got a good beat, a bright look, and is still of a tonal piece with the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

The brain trust couldn’t cook up a fresh storytelling approach to go with its new locales, feeling the need to hit the standard plot beats. It’s a weird concept told in a totally conventional way. You could set your watch by the time the false climaxes, periods of doubt, determined scheming, and tearful emotional conclusions will appear. Then it all culminates in the same old endless rounds of weightless carnage and staggering body count that’s sadly expected and hard to take. The charm and knowingly goofy demeanor disappears as the movie glazes over and goes through the motions with a sense of “this is how we end these” instead of “here’s a natural conclusion to this story.” So here are hordes of anonymous figures slaughtered. Here's a one-on-one fight with the villain that goes on and on and on. Now here’s a ginormous spaceship leveling a metropolitan area. Again. Like last summer. And the summer before that. Marvel is consistent, churning out product with fun diverting detail that disappears once the fireworks start firing. It gets the job done, and I liked it more than not, but it wore me out.