Border States: Gareth Edwards’ Monsters at 15

There’s a particular line in Monsters that feels especially prescient in 2025. As Andrew and Sam (former IRL couple Scoot McNairy and Whitney Able) rest atop a Mesoamerican pyramid observing the colossal border wall that shields the US off from Central America’s so-called “Infected Zone”, Andrew observes: “It’s different looking at America from the outside in.” Monsters released in 2010, but in 2025 – in which a sitting US president openly antagonises and ridicules democratic allies, obstructs aid to disaster and war zones, and dismantles critical social programmes, all while smugly licking the boots of dictators – the line hits differently. Earlier, Andrew and Sam rest with their Infected Zone chaperones. In a line that’s either aged like wine or milk depending on your sensibilities, Sam innocently asks: “Do you think the wall will keep the creatures out of America?”

In 2008, Gareth Edwards entered and won the Sci-Fi-London 48-hour film challenge with his 5-minute dystopian fable Factory Farmed. Two short years later, Edwards debuted Monsters at SXSW after writing and directing it on a miraculous $500,000. Reflective of its budget, Monsters is extraordinarily lo-fi for a giant monster picture, achieving much of its atmosphere and tone through pure ambience – no sequence or set piece is rushed or particularly fast paced, and dialogue is naturalistic, minimal and sometimes stilted in a true-to-life fashion. Edwards makes time for his cast and characters to breathe in his expertly crafted lived-in world (brought to chillingly realistic life with sensible use of CGI), allowing Monsters to quietly ruminate on the nature of disaster, border politics, immigration, and more – all while trusting its audience to get what it’s saying. There’s no clumsy “Borders are wrong!” pontificating here – just the slow, quiet, and very human realisation that what’ve you’ve been told to think might not be just.

Monsters is arguably unsubtle in its politics and depiction of border relations – but what need is there for subtlety in a film set on such a charged locale as the US-Mexico border? There’s an eerie sequence that sees Andrew and Sam finally reach the border wall only to find it deserted – a far cry from the estimated 9200 (and counting) US troops currently stationed at the border. They freely pass through the abandoned US Homeland Security checkpoint into a ruined and desolate Texas, notably in a far worse state than many of the Central American locations featured earlier in the film ­– including those within the Infected Zone. With the current US president elected via a campaign that dehumanised and vilified immigrants and promised their expulsion, it would be easy (but brainless) to apply a right-wing reading to Monsters’ depiction of alien creatures abandoning their Southern territory to pass through the US border and wreak havoc. However, this would ignore the omnipresence of the jingoistic US military throughout, who regularly conduct bombing raids and carpet the Southern side of the border (both Infected and otherwise) with chemical weaponry, eerily reflecting the CIA’s recent announcement of additional drone activity over Mexico to target organised crime and drug cartels, now officially labelled “foreign terrorists”.

The overwhelming human cost of the US military’s action in the film is reflected in the title characters themselves – the so-called monsters. Throughout, the creatures are depicted as gentle giants, communicating peacefully with each other through bioluminescence and echolocation (serving as blueprints for the MUTOs in Edwards’ Godzilla). Even when they attack Andrew and Sam’s convoy in the Infected Zone, they are drawn in by the bright lights of the vehicles, met with gunfire, and provoked into self-defence, which earns them their titular nom de plume and “justifies” the violence against them. The entire situation – a dangerous pilgrimage through volatile territory to reach the US – would be unnecessary had America provided appropriate and unconditional aid to its Southern neighbours. America’s overt aggression against the creatures is entirely an exercise in reckless self-preservation, and with desolation on the Texas side of the border, the US appears to have triggered its own ruin.

The oppressive, overbearing US military presence in the Central America of Monsters invokes the chaotic, militarised hellscape of Apocalypse Now’s Vietnam – as does a riverboat journey through unpredictable territory and a deliberately obnoxious opening (and closing) rendition of “Ride of the Valkyries”. Abandoned homes, trigger-happy militias, and repeated references to a crashed NASA space probe as the cause of the extra-terrestrial incursion recalls Night of the Living Dead, while a tense encounter with a strange fin-like shape in river waters conjures Jurassic Park III’s Spinosaurus (fittingly, Edwards is set to deliver franchise reboot Jurassic World: Rebirth this coming Summer). Throughout his filmography, Edwards has emerged a master of harnessing the Spielbergian influence that so many filmmakers insubstantially tout, and a set of curious tentacles in Monsters’ climax evokes a similar (but far more sinister) sequence in Spielberg’s Iraq War-flavoured War of the Worlds. Yet, there’s as much of Before Sunrise’s lo-fi love story to Monsters as there is horror, sci-fi, and war influence. Andrew and Sam are brought together by appointment rather than Jesse and Céline’s chance encounter, but both sets of brown-haired boys and blonde-haired girls illustrate their journeys through the unfamiliar by sharing their histories, hopes, and ambitions, free of the confines, restrictions, and responsibilities of their “real” lives.

In reply to Sam’s query of whether the border will successfully confine the creatures to Central America, a member of their party muses that while the American government has spent a considerable amount of money on defensive measures, nature cannot be fought. It’s an old cliché to query who the real monsters are in any given creature feature, but no other English-language picture in decades so eloquently and profoundly explores the contradiction between mankind and the monstrous as Monsters does. Fifteen years later, we’re in an era where the mundane evil of trade tariffs threatens the existence of democracy itself. We no longer need to speculate about the dangers of the Infected Zone – we’re living in it.

With thanks to Michael Callari