Note: This review contains spoilers. But then the film title contains spoilers so I don’t care.
Monsters Vs Aliens 3D suggests there is something amusing in having a clear mission statement as your title. It seems to be saying that it both recognises the awesomeness of a Monster / Alien bust up, and is going to give you it in spades, and three dimensions. So it comes as a little bit of a little bit of a let down to discover that it is actually only one alien who is eventually defeated single handedly by a 50ft woman, which is on the borderline of the description of monstrousness. Oh and I saw it in 2D, because 3D doesn’t work for me and playing dress up in the cinema is not my thing.
So the good about Monsters vs Aliens, beyond its title. Well there is lots of fun character design, and a great meshing of personality and animation in Seth Rogen’s Bob. It is a computer animated film which has a female lead character which is nigh on unheard of (well if you are Pixar).It has some nice empowerment messages.
The down side. Well the solution to the empowerment issue is, er, to actually get empowered with real actual super powers and grow to 50 feet. Susan/Ginormica may have discovered that she did not want to be defined by a marriage but only after she no longer could be. But the true bad in this patchy film is summed up wholly by this sequence here:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CZ2Z6bWyqoI
This is a kids film. Its a kids films aimed squarely at kids, seven year-olds. A long, tedious, build up for the President contact with the alien with no gags in it, followed by
a) A Close Encounters Of The Third Kind spoof
b) A funny dance to Axel F.
Neither of these things will have any relevance to its target audience. Its two of the film when the kids around me were just plain bored. And the adults were bemused because they have seen better Close Encounters spoofs before. And it sums up the problem of a film which is fundamentally a parody of films that it has to assume 95% of its audience have never seen. It should never have to rely on gags to do with that parody, though it often does. The central arc of Susan, whilst not quite feministsploitation does still feel a bit like it hasn’t quite worked out her happy ever after beyond being her own woman. And is in the end really only a battle between her and the rather dull alien. Not terrible, (its no Meet The Robinsons), but it should have been a whole lot better.
As for the 3D: when the opening shot is someone playing bat and ball into the camera, you know they are all about the gimmick rather than the artistic properties.