Love And Monsters takes us to the kind of world you’d get if a well-meaning kid used a Monkey’s Paw to wish for Pokémon to be real.
Part monster mash, part post-apocalyptic teen adventure, Dylan O’Brien makes for a likeable hero as he sets out on a family-friendly quest for love through the post-apocalyptic wilderness of “Love And Monsters”.
When an asteroid headed towards the Earth is destroyed, it showers the planet with a chemical fallout which causes all cold-blooded animals to mutate. As these giant monsters wreak havoc, Joel Dawson (Dylan O’Brien) is separated from his girlfriend Aimee (Jessica Henwick) and loses his parents to a monster attack before being bundled into the back of a pick-up and evacuated. Seven years later and the scattered remnants of humanity survive in small colony bunkers but when a giant ant breaches his colony, Joel decides to set off on a quest to reunite with Aimee so he doesn’t end up alone.
LOVE AND MONSTERS shares a great deal of its DNA with the likes of ZOMBIELAND, albeit with a decidedly family-friendly restraint on its tone. There’s the same knowing awareness of its genre and its tropes, a band of colourful and quirky characters and a snarky sense of humour underpinning the action – which manages to walk the fine line of scary but not too scary for its four-quadrant audience.
The straightforward hero’s journey is strengthened by an added ‘coming of age’ element as the initially timid and naïve Joel learns through trials and errors how to survive on the surface world, a learning curve that’s helped enormously by his encounters with Clyde (Michael Rooker) and Minnow (Ariana Greenblatt), a pair of survivalist experts heading for a sanctuary zone and bolstered by the movie’s best character of all – Boy, a dog that Joel befriends early in his quest.
Along the way, there’s plenty of eye-popping action, thanks to the Oscar-nominated visual effects and more than a few genuinely poignant moments as Joel encounters unexpected connections to his past and finds that the journey changes him so that the man who reunites with Aimee isn’t the same one who left the dwindling safety of his colony.
Debuting on Netflix due to its theatrical release being thwarted by Covid-19, LOVE AND MONSTERS is a real win for the streaming network after a run of mediocre ‘originals’. There’s plenty of scope for a sequel or two exploring more of this world but while streaming services have provided a safe harbour during turbulent box office times for movies like this, it remains to be seen if they’ll also be fertile ground for sequels to sprout.
