Man And Monster: A mural depicts the invaders, (below) the long road home, and (opposite) filmmaker Gareth Edwards.
of the behemoths at first, showing us their capacity for destruction via destroyed buildings and the corpses left in their wake. One way in which the filmmaker sets au- diences on edge is that the creatures are heard long before they are ever seen. Edwards credits sound de- signer Jürgen Funk and re-recording mixer Matthias Schwab for creating the disturbing sounds of the ap- proaching aliens. “Essentially, we just had a brief conversation about
what it should sound like, and my opinion was that these things are water-based, and they come out of the water, so I was thinking of whale calls and dolphin clicks and things like that. It had this deep sea feel to it.”
Aside from being simply scary, the monsters of Mon-
sters also work on a metaphorical level. Some film crit- ics have suggested that the huge wall the American government builds along the Mexican border to keep the creatures out, as well as scenes of American troops attacking the monsters, are metaphors for current top- ics such as immigration and the War on Terror. But Ed- wards insists those aspects were simply devices of narrative necessity more than an extant political agenda. “The reality of these things is it’s not as simple as
the movies make out, so you use real-world scenar- ios to explain it, and obviously they influence the
movie a little bit,” he says. “It’s not like we had a political message that we wanted to
ram down people’s throats. It’s a case of wanting it to feel real, so I used real-world scenarios to help base our fantastic scenario on.” Instead, Edwards uses the monsters as metaphors
for Samantha and Andrew’s relationship. “This sounds really pretentious, but if you notice, it’s
six years ago this pod came down to Earth and created this problem, and it’s also the sixth birthday of An- drew’s kid. It’s like on the same day this seed came and created this problem that he’s trying to contain, and he’s built a barrier up. The world’s built this barrier up [too], and they’re ignoring the problem. The day that he lets the barrier down and they switch off the media that’s telling them it’s so bad, when you see him em- brace it, you then see the beauty in it. “The theme of the film, without realizing it when we
were doing it, is you can’t fight nature,” he continues. “It’s like [Samantha and Andrew are] fighting nature by not trying to get it on with each other, and the world is fighting nature trying to not let these things out. Obviously, these things are migrat- ing because they’re trying to find a mate. They’re just trying to connect, and it’s ex- actly what these two [charac-
ters] are doing. All everyone’s doing is trying to find a connection to someone else.” Aiding and abetting Edwards’ storytelling is his ex-
tensive yet unobtrusive use of CGI. Instead of creating James Cameron-style wow moments, Edwards uses his visual effects background to tweak road signs, eliminate background traffic and insert his monsters in order to tell his story, not to try to make a blockbuster. “For some reason, there are filmmakers who love
that stuff and think it’s great and adds excitement, but personally it just throws me out of the film. I feel like I’m watching a computer game, and that’s not the kind of film that I want to do.” As to where Edwards’ film fits into the lineage of
creature features, he’s not too sure, but hopes that Monsters inspires other filmmakers to use CGI cre- atively. “I think there’s this wave of new filmmakers...with
digital and CGI filmmaking expertise – in that we’ve grown up with computers, we know how to do visual effects on our own – and the honeymoon’s over, we
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