A cute little idea pumped up by the latest digital technology, “Monsters vs. Aliens” delivers what it promises. Despite the fearsome suggestion of its title, there’s never any doubt whom we’re rooting for in this galactic battle: monsters all the way.
Not unlike the recent “Race to Witch Mountain,” this 3-D animated comedy suggests that the government has always known about monsters and aliens, but has kept them secret. A group of monsters is kept imprisoned in an undisclosed location.
These include the brainy Dr. Cockroach (voiced by Hugh Laurie), whose cross-species status is the result of an experiment much like the one in “The Fly”; Missing Link (Will Arnett), who looks a lot like a certain Creature from a Black Lagoon; B.O.B. (Seth Rogen), a blobby mass of indestructible goo; and Insectosaurus, a giant moth.
New to their ranks is a once-normal suburban woman named Susan (Reese Witherspoon) who was conked by a meteor on her wedding day and grew to amazing colossal size. Dubbed, understandably, Ginormica, she is the most reluctant of the monster crew.
They’re pressed into service by General W.R. Monger (Kiefer Sutherland) at the behest of the president (Stephen Colbert) to defend the planet against alien invasion.
The result of this nifty premise is a wildly uneven movie — sometimes really funny and clever, sometimes just random action.
It’s the latest from DreamWorks Animation, the studio that made the pop-culture savvy “Shrek” pictures and the painfully in-jokey “Shark Tale.” This one is less frantic than those movies, which is good, and it creates some genuinely likable characters, especially the bewildered Ginormica, who would really prefer to be called Susan.
There are wrong-headed jokes, such as the president’s initial attempt to communicate with the alien spacecraft via music (the notes are from DreamWorks founder Steven Spielberg’s “Close Encounters,” followed by a riff on the music from “Beverly Hills Cop,” for no apparent reason).
The 3-D effects are fun without being overwhelming, with an initial joke involving a paddle ball that goes straight back to an egregious sequence in 1953’s “House of Wax,” one of the first 3-D movies.
And although the practice of casting famous movie stars in cartoon roles still strikes me as overkill, in this case the celebrity voices are unusually good, especially Witherspoon.
Kids will love B.O.B., and the “Simpsons”-style references will keep baby boomers amused. There’s a lesson here: An attack by a 50-foot woman is sure-fire entertainment.
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