Love and Monsters – 2020/21
Well, this certainly has been a difficult year. The Pandemic has affected nearly every aspect of life, and the film industry has been no exception. But I would say that the quality of the movies we did get this past year have been just as good as ever. The modern trend of visually flashy CGI effects is still going strong, and Love and Monsters certainly has plenty of them.
Of course, we all came to see the monsters, and in this they did not disappoint. The concept was that nuclear fallout and radiation turned the various creatures that inhabit the planet into mutated, giant versions of the originals, and there was a pretty good variety of species shown in the film. There were insects, amphibians, crustaceans, and others that menaced our heroes, and looked great on the screen.
These completely CGI effects might have been just run-of-the-mill, except they had one interesting thing going for them: the lighting. One of the things I’ve noticed in many of the movies that I’ve reviewed for the Best Visual Effects category is that the scenes in which they appear are dark, or at least dimly lit. This has the benefit of hiding flaws. It also requires a smaller amount of minute detail from the digital artists. But in this movie, most of the monsters are seen in bright daylight, which is, in itself, a difficult light for filmmakers to work with.
All that means is that the CGI renderers have to put an insane amount of detail into their digital creations. Nowhere in the film was this more evident than in the climactic scene where a crab as big as a house attacks people in broad daylight on a beach. Because of the lighting, you could see every little bump on its crusty, seaweed-laden shell. You could see its mutated maw with all its monster teeth. And you could see its awesome alien eyes. Of course, being able to see its eyes was a plot point, so I suppose they had to have given them a bit of extra attention. But this hyper-detailed rendering made them look as real as anything.
I also liked the snail that Joel encounters in the forest. It was supposed to be a gentle giant, and they did a great job of bringing that across. The monster frog was properly menacing, and the Queen Sand-Gobbler, which was the giant mutation of a centipede, was pretty scary. The fantastic realism of the impossible creatures could have been right at home in an old Ray Harryhousen movie, or even a modern horror film, though the scariness of the visual effects were softened by a light-hearted story. The movie meshed the action/horror genre with that of a mild romance. So maybe the scary monsters weren’t as horrifying as they could have been, but that wasn’t because of the VFX team. That was just the way the script was written. The movie was fairly successful, so who knows? Maybe we’ll see a sequel someday.