| Monsters vs. Aliens | |
|---|---|
 Theatrical release poster | |
| Directed by | |
| Screenplay by | |
| Story by |
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| Produced by | Lisa Stewart |
| Starring | |
| Edited by |
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| Music by | Henry Jackman |
Production company | |
| Distributed by | Paramount Pictures[b][4] |
Release date |
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Running time | 94 minutes[5] |
| Country | United States[2] |
| Language | English |
| Budget | $175 million[6] |
| Box office | $381.7 million[6] |
Monsters vs. Aliens is a 2009 American animatedscience fiction comedy film directed byConrad Vernon andRob Letterman and written by Letterman,Maya Forbes,Wally Wolodarsky,Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. Produced byDreamWorks Animation, it is the first installment in theMonsters vs. Aliens franchise. The film starsReese Witherspoon,Seth Rogen,Hugh Laurie,Will Arnett,Kiefer Sutherland,Rainn Wilson,Paul Rudd, andStephen Colbert. The film involves a group of misfit monsters tasked by theUnited States Armed Forces to stop the invasion of an extraterrestrial villain and save the Earth in exchange for freedom.
It was DreamWorks Animation's first feature film to be produced in astereoscopic3D format instead of being converted into 3D after completion, which added $15 million to the film's budget.[7]
Monsters vs. Aliens was released in the United States on March 27, 2009, byParamount Pictures, to mixed reviews from critics. It was a box-office success, grossing $381 million on a $175 million budget. It was followed by twotelevision specials,Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space andNight of the Living Carrots, anda television series in 2013.
InModesto, California, Susan Murphy prepares for her wedding to weatherman Derek Dietl, who switches their honeymoon inParis, France toFresno for a career opportunity. Just before the ceremony, ameteorite from a destroyed planet lands on her. She initially appears unharmed but, during the ceremony, energy she absorbed from the meteorite causes her to grow 50 feet 10 inches tall, accidentally destroying the church. AU.S. military detachment quickly arrives totranquilize and capture her. Susan awakens in a top-secret government facility for monsters, where she meets General W.R. Monger, the 89-year-oldU.S. Army officer in charge of the facility, and her fellow inmates: Dr. Herbert CockroachPh.D., ascientist turned human-cockroach hybrid; B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), a live, brainless, indestructible gelatinous mass of blue goo; the Missing Link, a prehistoric 20,000-year-old fish-ape hybrid; and Insectosaurus, a 350-foot-tallbug mutated bynuclear radiation. Susan is renamed "Ginormica" by thegovernment and is forbidden any contact with her friends and family.
Meanwhile, faraway on his mysterious spaceship, asquid-likeextraterrestrial alien overlord named Gallaxhar is alerted to the presence of "Quantonium", a powerful substance, on Earth; he sends a gigantic robotic retrieval alien probe. When it lands, the unintelligentPresident of the United States, President Hathaway, who is also Monger's boss, attemptsfirst contact by playing "Axel F" on akeyboard, but the machine simply goes on a destructive attack straight towardsSan Francisco, unaffected by the military's attempts to destroy it. Monger convinces Hathaway to grant the monsters their freedom if they can stop the robot. In San Francisco, the probe detects the Quantonium within Ginormica's body and targets her. The monsters finally manage to destroy it at theGolden Gate Bridge by using parts of the bridge itself, so the government sets them free.
Gallaxhar sets a course for Earth to obtain the Quantonium himself while the now-free Ginormica returns home with her new friends and reunites with her parents. While the monsters cause some havoc due to their lack of social experience, she tries to reunite with Derek but he breaks off their engagement, believing she would overshadow his career. Initially heartbroken, Ginormica soon realizes that her life was better as a monster and that she achieved things without Derek involved at all and embraces her new self. Suddenly, Gallaxhar's ship arrives and uses a tractor beam to pull Ginormica on board; Insectosaurus is shot and seemingly killed when he tries to intervene.
Enraged by her friend's supposed death, Ginormica quickly breaches containment and chases Gallaxhar, but he traps her in a machine that extracts the Quantonium from her body, shrinking her back to her original size. Gallaxhar then uses the extracted Quantonium to createclones of himself in order to launch a full-scale invasion of Earth. Monger manages to get B.O.B., Link, and Dr. Cockroach onto the ship, where they rescue Ginormica and make their way to the main power core where Dr. Cockroach sets the ship to self-destruct to prevent the invasion. Confronting Gallaxhar on the bridge as he tries to escape, Ginormica reabsorbs the Quantonium, restoring her monstrous size and strength. Rescuing her friends, they flee the ship and are rescued by Monger and Insectosaurus, nowmetamorphosed into abutterfly. The ship explodes, killing Gallaxhar and his army.
Returning to Modesto, Ginormica, B.O.B., Dr. Cockroach, Link, and Insectosaurus receive a hero's welcome. Hoping to give himself a career boost, Derek tries to get back with Ginormica, but she rejects and humiliates him live on TV with B.O.B. swallowing Derek up and spitting him out. Monger informs the monsters that a monstrous snail named "Escargantua," mutated from falling into a French nuclear reactor, is slowly making its way to Paris, so the monsters head out to confront the new threat.
In amid-credits scene, Hathaway, pleased with Monger's work for helping the monsters save the world from Gallaxhar, promotes him to the President's senior security staff/chairman of theJoint Chiefs of Staff as his reward (also his gift to him for his 90th birthday), but Hathaway's attempt to celebrate withcoffee ends with him pressing the wrong button, causing their country's nuclear arsenals to launch. Realizing what he did, he then asks if anyone in theaudience wants to freeze his head.
The film started as an adaptation of a horror comic book,Rex Havoc,[11] in which a monster hunter Rex and his team of experts called "Ass-Kickers of the Fantastic" fight against ghouls, ghosts and other creatures.[12] The earliest development goes back to 2002, when DreamWorks first filed for aRex Havoc trademark.[13] In a plot synopsis revealed in 2005, Rex was to assemble a team of monsters, including Ick!, Dr. Cockroach, the 50,000 Pound Woman and Insectosaurus, to fight aliens for disrupting cable TV service.[11] In the following years, the film's story diverged away from the originalRex Havoc, with directorsConrad Vernon andRob Letterman finally creating the storyline from scratch. Letterman would also co-write the film's screenplay with husband and wife duoMaya Forbes andWally Wolodarsky, and screenwriting duoJonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger.[14]
Production designer David James stated that the film is "a return to what made us nerds in the first place," getting classic movie monsters and relaunching them in a contemporary setting. DirectorConrad Vernon added that he found it would be a great idea to take hideous monsters and give them personalities and satirize the archetypes.[15] Each of the five monsters has traits traceable to sci-fi/horror B movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, although none is a mere copy of an older character.[16] Susan/Ginormica, who grows to be 49 feet 11 inches tall, was inspired byAttack of the 50 Foot Woman. Dr. Cockroach representsThe Fly andThe Curse of Frankenstein, while B.O.B. is an amalgam of slithering and slimy characters that were featured in the films, includingThe Blob andThe Crawling Eye. Insectosaurus, a 350-foot-tall monster, is a nod to the 1961 Kaiju filmMothra. According to Vernon, the Missing Link has no direct inspiration. He "just represents anything prehistoric that comes back to life and terrorizes people."[16] For the San Francisco sequence, the producers researched many films and photographs for an accurate depiction of the city, and filmed animator Line Andersen, who had a similar body type to Ginormica—tall, thin, and athletic-looking—walking alongside a scale model of San Francisco, to capture better how a person not comfortable with being too big with an environment would walk around it.[15]
Ed Leonard, CTO of DreamWorks Animation, says it took approximately 45.6 million computing hours to makeMonsters vs. Aliens, more than eight times as many as the originalShrek. Several hundredHewlett-Packard xw8600 workstations were used, along with a 'render farm' of HP ProLiantblade servers with over 9,000 server processor cores, to process the animation sequence. Animators used 120terabytes of data to complete the film. They used 6 TB for an explosion scene.[17]
Starting withMonsters vs. Aliens, all feature films released by DreamWorks Animation were produced in astereoscopic 3D format, usingIntel'sInTru3D technology.[18] 2D,RealD 3D,IMAX 3D, and4DX versions were released.
To promote the 3-D technology that is used inMonsters vs. Aliens, DreamWorks ran a 3-D trailer before halftime in the U.S. broadcast ofSuper Bowl XLIII on February 1, 2009. Due to the limitations of television technology at the time,ColorCode 3-D glasses were distributed atSoBe stands at major national grocers. The Monsters, except Ginormica and Insectosaurus, also appeared in a 3-D SoBe commercial airing after the trailer.Bank of America gave away vouchers that covered the cost of an upgrade to a 3-D theatrical viewing of the film for its customers.[19]
Monsters vs. Aliens was released toDVD andBlu-ray in the United States and Canada on September 29, 2009, and on October 26, 2009, in the United Kingdom. The home release for both the DVD and Blu-ray format only contains the 2D version of the movie. However, the release is packaged with a new short,B.O.B.'s Big Break, which is in the anaglyphic 3D format that requires red and cyan glasses.[20] Also included are four pairs of 3D glasses.[20] On January 6, 2010, it was announced that a 3D version would be released on Blu-ray.[21] On February 24, a tentative March release date was set for the United Kingdom, where anyone who buys a Samsung 3D TV or 3D Blu-ray player will get a copy.[22] On March 8, it was reported that the 3D Blu-ray would be released in the United States, also with Samsung 3D products, on March 21.[23] As of February 2011, 9.0 million home entertainment units were sold worldwide.[24] In July 2014, the film's distribution rights were purchased byDreamWorks Animation fromParamount Pictures and transferred to20th Century Fox; the rights are now owned byUniversal Pictures following its parent company NBCUniversal's acquisition of DreamWorks Animation in 2016, and the expiration of their distribution deal with 20th Century Fox in 2017.[25]
On its opening weekend, the film opened at number 1, grossing $59.3 million in 4,104 theaters.[26] Of that total, the film grossed an estimated $5.2 million inIMAX 3D theatres, becoming the fifth-highest-grossing IMAX 3D debut, behindStar Trek,Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen,The Dark Knight, andWatchmen.[27] The film grossed $198.4 million in the United States and Canada, making it the second-highest-grossing animated movie of the year in these regions behindUp. Worldwide, it is the third-highest-grossing animated film of 2009 with a total of $381.7 million behindUp andIce Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. It was the highest-grossing film worldwide in Witherspoon's career untilSing overtook it in 2017.[28]
Based on 217 reviews collected byRotten Tomatoes,Monsters vs. Aliens has an overall approval rating from critics of 73% and an average score of 6.5/10. The critical consensus reads: "Though it doesn't approach the depth of the best-animated films,Monsters vs. Aliens has enough humor and special effects to entertain moviegoers of all ages."[29] OnMetacritic, which assigns a normalized rating from mainstream critics, the film has received a score of 56 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, which indicates "mixed or average reviews".[30] Audiences polled byCinemaScore gave the film an A− grade, on an A+ to F scale.[31]
Roger Ebert of theChicago Sun-Times gave the film two and a half stars out of four, writing, "I suppose kids will like this movie", though he "didn't find [it] rich with humor".[32]Peter Travers ofRolling Stone gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "WALL-E had more charm, more soul, more everything. But there's enough merry mischief here to satisfy, even if you're way past puberty."[33]
In 2009, the film was nominated for fourAnnie Awards, includingVoice Acting in a Feature Production for Hugh Laurie.[34]Reese Witherspoon andSeth Rogen were both nominated for best voice actor and actress at the2010 Kids' Choice Awards for voicing Ginormica and B.O.B, respectively,[35] but lost toJim Carrey forDisney's A Christmas Carol.[36]Monsters vs. Aliens was also nominated for Best Animated film but lost toPixar'sUp.[36] On June 24, 2009, the film won theSaturn Award for Best Animated Film.[37]
| Award | Category | Name | Result |
|---|---|---|---|
| Annie Awards[38] | Annie Award for Best Animated Effects in an Animated Production | Scott Cegielski | Nominated |
| Annie Award for Best Storyboarding in an Animated Feature Production | Tom Owens | Won | |
| Annie Award for Best Voice Acting in an Animated Feature Production | Hugh Laurie | Nominated | |
| Kids' Choice Awards[35] | Favorite Voice from an Animated Movie | Seth Rogen | Nominated |
| Reese Witherspoon | Nominated | ||
| Favorite Animated Movie | Rob Letterman Conrad Vernon | Nominated | |
| Saturn Awards[37] | Saturn Award for Best Animated Film | Rob Letterman Conrad Vernon | Won |
| Visual Effects Society[39] | Animated Character in an Animated Feature Motion Picture | Terran Boylan David Burgess Scott Cegielski David Weatherly | Nominated |
| Outstanding Effects Animation in an Animated Feature Motion Picture | David P. Allen Amaury Aubel Scott Cegielski Alain De Hoe | Nominated |
In April 2011,DreamWorks Animation CEOJeffrey Katzenberg commented that the studio did not have plans to produce future movie-genre parodies likeMegamind (2010),Monsters vs. Aliens, andShark Tale (2004), nor sequels to these, saying that these films "all shared an approach and tone and idea of parody, and did not travel well internationally. We don't have anything like that coming on our schedule now."[40]
The film was followed by twotelevision specials titledMonsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space andNight of the Living Carrots, then atelevision series which started airing onNickelodeon on March 23, 2013, and was cancelled after one season due to low ratings and the network's desire to refocus on making the more "Nickish" shows.[41]
News provided by DreamWorks Animation SKG, Inc.
