Reviews
Empire Magazine
Dan Jolin
“An amazing achievement for a ‘first-time’ filmmaker, which measures up to the finest indies for performance and character-work, and the biggest blockbusters for jaw-dropping effects. And it has the year’s best sex scene, too.”
07/12/2010
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The Financial Times
Nigel Andrews
“First-time British feature-maker Gareth Edwards (also cinematographer and effects designer) wrote a screenplay, deliberately corny at times, even clunky-allegorical with its US-built “Wall” to keep out aliens – doublespeak for illegal Mexican immigrants and space octopuses – in order to ravish us more fully, more brutally, more brilliantly with his mise-en-scène and Camus-worthy mastery of foreboding.”
01/12/2010
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Total Film
Matt Glasby
“The most audacious debut since The Blair Witch Project. As a film it’s a couple of notches shy of a masterpiece, but as an achievement it’s completely without precedent.”
02/12/2010
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The Guardian
Peter Bradshaw
“Both the satire and the human story are more involving than in District 9, and McNairy, in particular, gives an excellent and very convincing performance. This is a very postmodern sci-fi, with its downbeat approach to the monsters themselves, but with a hugely involving love story.”
02/12/2010
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The Independent on Sunday
Nicholas Barber
“The writer-directorial debut from Gareth Edwards, a British special-effects wizard, is a resourceful, winningly original film with a patina of grimy authenticity and a Spielbergian sense of wonder. It marks Edwards out as an exciting new talent. At the end of Monsters, though, you're left feeling that there should have been more to it... there's very little plot, very little danger, and if Edwards has anything satirical to say, it's that old science-fiction platitude that it's the American armed forces, not the creatures from another world, that are the real monsters. ”
05/12/2010
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The New York Times
Jeannette Catsoulis
“Despite a clunky immigration message (“We’re imprisoning ourselves,” says the photographer, surveying the gargantuan blockade on the border of the quarantined zone), “Monsters” effortlessly compels. The ending may be pure sci-fi schmaltz, but it’s schmaltz that this viewer, at least, could believe in. ”
28/10/2010
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The Observer
Philip French
“The film feeds on the current American paranoia about threats from south of the Rio Grande and is a remarkable piece of work, full of neat touches.”
05/12/2010
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The Daily Telegraph
Tim Robey
“On the budget Edwards has got, it’s impressive he isn’t even more sparing with the ingeniously murky effects shots. Visually and sonically, his film should be the envy of shoestring guerrilla filmmakers the world over. It’s a gorgeous and unsettling ride, a road movie about an almost-romance, with the threat of the unknown hanging in the air, and an ending, both beautiful and elegantly scary, that sends shivers down the spine.”
02/12/2010
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Time Out
Nigel Floyd
“With the notable exception of the moving monster climax, the best scenes are the quiet, human ones, such as Kaulder flirting with Sam in a seedy hotel while scenes of monster mayhem are only glimpsed on a fuzzy black-and-white TV set. ”
02/12/2010
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The Times
Kate Muir
“In a tradition that goes back to H. P. Lovecraft’s The Dunwich Horror and beyond, the rumour and trail of the monster is more disturbing than the creature itself. In these days of simplistic, in-your-face Saw 3-D, subtle psychological damage is far more fascinating.”
03/12/2010
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The Sunday Times
Cosmo Landesman
“His film achieves the difficult trick of making the hoary old alien-invasion story seem fresh and realistic.”
05/12/2010
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The Los Angeles Times
Robert Abele
“It's almost inexplicable that Edwards would set up an overstuffed geopolitical allegory complete with screeching, tentacled behemoths (glimpsed early on in a Humvee-attack prologue) and focus instead on two empty-headed blanks who never seem in any real peril or say anything interesting. (Blame that increasingly overused crutch for "realism": ad-libbed dialogue.)”
29/10/2010
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