Homeland Insecurity: Macho Globalization and Alien Blowback in Monsters

Abstract

A SMALL-BUDGET, INDEPENDENT FILM WRITTEN, DIRECTED, AND visually enhanced by British filmmaker Gareth Edwards, Monsters (2010), features a story concept clearly with the potential for a big-budget, alien-invasion action film. However, this movie goes out of its way to disappoint such spectacular expectations for that popular genre. 1 Monsters depicts a private-life view of an encounter with large monsters rather than the usual pitched and very public military struggle against such terrifying outsiders. The tone of the movie is intimate and meditative. Moreover, Edwards delivers a deliberate and observant political-economic treatment of such an incredible event, something not typical of most monster films. In effect, the action-packed backstory of an alien life form being brought to earth by NASA, but getting accidentally out of control with the consequence being an "Infected Zone" taking up the northern half of Mexico, is skillfully told in the background of Monsters. That is, through glimpses of television news reports and public service announcements, by reading the innumerable public signs, maps, and murals attempting to deal with the situation, or via the constant flyovers of fighter jets and helicopters or the ubiquitous wreckage of buildings, trains, boats, and military hardware, the viewer is able to piece together not only events, but the fact that six years of alien presence on earth bizarrely has naturalized this disaster. It seems that a migration/expansion of habitat by "the creatures" has become a yearly event producing an anxious time for both Mexico and the United States. The Mexican government and people are hard-pressed to cope with the outright invasion of their territory, while the US government and military work hard to keep the aliens-that they