Monsters vs. Aliens

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Cinemama's review: 'Monsters': Funny, but Not Out of This World

The animated movie "Monsters vs. Aliens" is soulless. It's too violent and frightening for small children and too noisy for anyone possessing a pair of ears. It's also dull, derivative, and -- this is truly remarkable -- draining the funny out of the likes of Paul Rudd and Stephen Colbert.

That's not the worst of it. "Monsters vs. Aliens" posits itself as a story of female empowerment, but Dreamworks gives us a heroine who is essentially a giant blow-up doll. Ginormica, the superstrong woman little girls are supposed to look up to, has been nipped and tucked to the point of distraction.

To start, Susan (Reese Witherspoon, whose wistful, distinctive voice gives the movie its only charm) is just like any nice, average girl from Modesto with an old-fashioned dream of finding happiness through marriage. On her wedding day to local TV weatherman Derek (Rudd), Susan learns she won't be going to Paris on her honeymoon as planned. Derek is going to an audition in Fresno instead (if Susan has a career of her own, it's not mentioned). She's just perky enough to smile and tell Derek that's fine. Then, while taking a moment in a meadow to process the loss of Paris, she gets hit by a meteor.

The screenplay, which five writers penned at some point, including director Rob Letterman, glosses over the meteor's backstory, but there's something powerful in there. Take the effect of Kryptonite on Superman and reverse it. Susan turns into the almost-50-foot woman while standing at the altar. She breaks through the seams on her wedding dress and is soon banging her head on the church rafters while her slip creeps up her thighs. She evolves into something so absurdly proportioned that she/it could give Heidi Klum a complex. Was there a woman anywhere in this gang of animators?

The X-Files guys arrive, put a drugged dart into one of Susan's impossibly toned legs and take her off to their containment area. There she's renamed Ginormica and left to languish with a quartet of other monsters. We've got B.O.B. (Seth Rogen) a mentally challenged version of Sully from "Monsters, Inc." (he's the same shade of blue). Then there's Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), a mad scientist who turned himself into a bug accidentally, an homage to "The Fly" that will whiz over the heads of most 10-year-olds. Will Arnett voices the Missing Link, an ugly, insecure and egotistical lizard. Rounding out the group is a furry creature called Insectosaurus who is both taller than Ginormica and blessedly mute. He/she/it is a shameless rip-off of Totoro, Hayao Miyazaki's far more bewitching creation.

This movie feels created by a marketing impulse to imitate successful children's films rather than finding filmmakers with fresh creative urges. (How many people who don't know their Dreamworks from their Pixar -- easy enough for your average moviegoer to miss -- are going to assume this is a sequel to "Monsters, Inc."?) That is depressing enough. But then comes the alien invasion, led by a squidlike creature named Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson, at his most obnoxious), who wants to retrieve that meteor juice from poor Susan. The clueless president (how retro) of the United States (Colbert) agrees to let a crazed career general (Kiefer Sutherland) take a crack at using the monsters to fight the aliens. We end up in a "War of the Worlds" kind of scenario. Always fun for kids, right?

My 5-year-old spent most of the movie hiding his face in my sweater while I cursed myself for having brought him to a movie produced by the same people who brought us the crass and clumsy "Shark Tale" and the tedious "Kung Fu Panda." Granted, I saw the film in 3-D, which heightens the effect of most action sequences, and parents will be able to opt out of that if they prefer. But if you take out the coolness factor of 3-D, what's left? Not much.

Mary Pols is a Bay Area-based journalist. She reviews movies for Time.com and was for many years a film critic for the San Jose Mercury News, Oakland Tribune and Contra Costa Times. She is also the author of a memoir, "Accidentally on Purpose," published in 2008 by Ecco/ Harper Collins. When she's inspired, usually by something weird, she blogs about it at www.maryfpols.com.