Monsters Vs. Aliens: The DadCentric Review

Years ago I worked at Sea World. During that time, the higher-ups who ran the park were constantly talking about "competition" from other tourist-y type places, namely Disneyland. We must all do more, they would say, because we are competing with Disney for the hearts, minds, and dollars of tourists. Those of us in the trenches would listen to the Management talk about the "competition", and we'd laugh, for really, there was no competition. It was DISNEY. All of Sea World could, back before the California Adventure park was completed, fit in Disneyland's parking lot.

I was reminded of this while watching Dreamworks' latest attempt at providing Pixar with competition, the accurately named Monsters vs. Aliens. Once again, Dreamworks has rounded up a great cast and put them in an utterly forgettable, at times yawn-inducing computer-animated movie.

Monsters vs. Aliens is about monsters. Who fight aliens. In 3D. Long story short: our heroine, Susan (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) is getting ready to marry her obnoxious fiance, a TV weatherman (voiced by Paul Rudd). She is transformed into a giantess thanks to a wayward meteorite, and is whisked away to an Area 51-ish base where the Kiefer Sutherland-voiced General W.R. Monger (get it?) is warden to a group of monsters - half man, half cockroach Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie), half gorilla, one-fourth man, one-fourth fish The Missing Link (Will Arnett), B.O.B. the Blob (Seth Rogen), and the gigantic half hamster, half caterpillar Insectosaurus (not really voiced, just possessing a grating shriek). In pursuit of the meteorite is evil alien Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson) and his army of giant robots and cloned versions of himself. When Gallaxhar arrives on Earth, General Monger and the President (a surprisingly unfunny Stephen Colbert) enlist the monsters to fight the aliens. There's your movie.

It's difficult to pinpoint exactly what I didn't like about it. It wasn't as funny as it should have been - the gags and visual references are all very forced. The actors all sound very stiff and unnatural - one of the marks of a good animated film is that the dialogue should sound as if it's being, well, acted and not merely read. The most exciting and imaginative sequence in the movie happens about midway through, when Susan (whose "monster" name is Ginormica, a name that will not age well - "ginormous" is soooo 2007) battles a giant robot in downtown San Francisco. And the 3D effects are ok, but the flip side is that the dark 3D glasses make the animation's color and details look washed out and muted. Overall, there's just a genuine lack of effort here: the movie feels slapped together and phoned in, a step backward from Dreamworks' previous effort Kung Fu Panda and a reminder of the far superior quality of any of Pixar's films.

The best critic of a kid's film is a kid, and Lucas didn't really seem all that impressed with Monsters vs. Aliens either. During the movie, there was a considerable amount of fidgeting, and after the movie, there was a noticable lack of "Dad, can we go to Target and get a B.O.B. and a Missing Link?" In fact, he was much more excited about the awesome Star Trek trailer then anything that he saw in Monsters vs. Aliens. And the poster for Pixar's next flick, UP, prompted a dozen questions, starting with "I wish we could have seen that, Dad."