Monsters vs. Aliens (2009)

It's obvious that the makers of MONSTERS VS. ALIENS put so much time into creating a 3-D spectacle that they forgot to write jokes, much less a script. When you can take Seth Rogen, one of the funniest guys in film today, and make him not funny, you have really elevated mediocrity to a new level. Such is MONSTERS VS. ALIENS, a film that truly exists only as a showcase for technology that I am not a big fan of to begin with.

I will give credit where credit is due. Roger Ebert said it best (and I'm paraphrasing) that 3-D is nothing better than a distraction. We have, for a century, been able to imagine three dimentional universes out of the films we've seen our entire lives. And we never had to wear stupid glasses to do that, and we never got headaches from taking off the stupid glasses. And the stupid glasses cause us to not be able to see that the kids we are with are misbehaving down the row and then we don't notice that they're throwing popcorn until another dad taps you on the shoulder and complains and... I digress.

Like "Snakes on a Plane" before it, the one stroke of genius about this film is that its entire plot is present in its title. The only reason now to pay money to see it is for the 3-D part. There is no more depth to the story than what the title has conveyed. Hence the need for 3-D: to give the film some depth.

To make matters worse, the idiots who wrote this film decided that on all of the planet Earth, there would only be FIVE monsters, and that these five monsters would be locked away in a huge warehouse/prison fit to hold hundreds of monsters. Matter of fact, one of the five monsters isn't even really a "monster," per se, unless a "bridezilla" is a monster (and some men and even a few women might agree that this IS the case).

The film opens with Susan, a bride on her wedding day, finding out that her dream honeymoon will be pre-empted in favor of her soon-to-be-husband's opportunity for job advancement. She wimpily acquieses and then proceeds to get leveled by a meteor, which she then miraculously crawls out from under and then proceeds to grow to a height that is just shy of 50 feet tall because apparently the copyright on "50 foot woman" has yet to expire. She is soon apprehended Guliver-style and taken to a warehouse where she meets the other four monsters in America. They are released from their prison when the president of the United States (played by Stephen Colbert in a stroke-of-genius casting move) decides by the end of a witty Dr. Strangelove-spoofing sequence that they are our only hope against an impending alien invasion.

I'm still stuck on the fact that there are only five monsters. WHY? I have successfully suspended my disbelief that this world HAS monsters in it, so why not a Justice League of them? Fill up that warehouse! Instead, the attention is placed on only five of them. And even with that small number, the film manages to completely waste the talent of some mega voiceover talent, from Rogen to Reese Witherspoon to Hugh Laurie.

The aforementioned Dr. Strangelove spoof scene is one of the films two or three high points. In fact, all of the bright spots were moments when the film would reference something from the pop culture era of the adults in the audience. My other favorite moment was when the President climbed a towering staircase to make contact with the alien ship and began by playing John Williams' theme from "Close Encounters" on a Casio keyboard and then proceeded to break into "Axel F" from "Beverly Hills Cop" before nearly being destroyed. That was hilarious.

Unfortunately, not much else was funny. And how was the 3-D? Meh. It worked like it was supposed to. It was fine. And as I've said before, the only thing that made that 3-D necessary to begin with is the fact that the film really held no other special attraction.

I hope that if there's a "Monsters vs. Aliens 2" (and with Dreamworks, you know there will be) that there will be MORE monsters. Oh, and maybe they could hire a screenwriter, too.

1.0 out of 4