Monsters vs. Aliens

Monsters vs. Aliens
Theatrical release poster
Directed by	Conrad Vernon Rob Letterman
Produced by	Lisa Stewart
Written by	Maya Forbes Wallace Wolodarsky Rob Letterman Jonathan Aibel Glenn Berger
Story by	Rob Letterman Conrad Vernon
Starring	Reese Witherspoon Seth Rogen Hugh Laurie Will Arnett Kiefer Sutherland Rainn Wilson Stephen Colbert Paul Rudd
Music by	Henry Jackman
Edited by	Joyce Arrastia Eric Dapkewicz
Production company	DreamWorks Animation
Distributed by	Paramount Pictures
Release dates	March 27, 2009 (2009-03-27)
Running time	94 minutes
Country	United States
Language	English
Budget	$175 million[1]
Box office	$381,509,870[1]

Monsters vs. Aliens is a 2009 American 3D computer-animated science fiction action comedy film produced by DreamWorks Animation and distributed by Paramount Pictures. It was DreamWorks Animation's first feature film to be directly produced in a stereoscopic 3-D format instead of being converted into 3-D after completion, which added $15 million to the film's budget.^[2]

The film was scheduled for a May 2009 release, but the release date was moved to March 27, 2009. It was released on DVD and Blu-ray September 29, 2009 in North America and included the easter egg to the upcoming movies and previews. The film features the voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Kiefer Sutherland, Rainn Wilson, Stephen Colbert, and Paul Rudd.

It received generally favorable reviews from critics,^[3] and grossed over $381 million worldwide.^[1]

Plot

Bride-to-be Susan Murphy is struck by a meteorite on the day of her wedding to weatherman Derek Dietl. The meteorite exposes her to the substance quantonium. As the wedding is in progress, she rapidly grows, tearing most of her dress and smashing the church; as a side-effect, her hair turns white. Alerted to the meteorite, the military arrives and captures Susan who is given the code name "Ginormica" and sent to a top-secret secure facility headed by General W.R. Monger. There she meets her fellow monster inmates: B.O.B., a brainless, indestructible gelatinous blob; Dr. Cockroach, PhD, a mad scientist with the head and abilities of a cockroach; the Missing Link, an amphibious fish-ape hybrid; and Insectosaurus, a massive grub that is even larger than Susan.

Far out in space, an evil alien named Gallaxhar detects quantonium radiation on Earth and deploys a gigantic robot probe to find it. After the robot lands, the President of the United States attempts to make first contact with it but fails, and the impervious robot begins destroying everything in sight. General Monger convinces the President to use his monsters to fight the robot. The monsters are promised their freedom, if they succeed, and accept the mission. Arriving in San Francisco, Susan is chased by the robot over the Golden Gate Bridge, where the monsters defeat it.

Now free, Susan returns home and introduces her family to the monsters. They are quickly rejected, though, after innocently causing a neighborhood panic. Derek breaks up with Susan, claiming that he cannot be married to someone who would overshadow his career. At first devastated, Susan realizes that becoming a monster is an improvement on her life, and fully embraces her new role. Suddenly, she is abducted by Gallaxhar, who appears to kill Insectosaurus in the process. On Gallaxhar's spaceship, Susan escapes and chases Gallaxhar down, only to be lured into a machine that extracts the quantonium from her body, which shrinks her back down to her normal size. Gallaxhar then uses the extracted quantonium to power a machine that clones himself into an army to invade the Earth.

With General Monger's help, B.O.B., Dr. Cockroach and the Missing Link infiltrate Gallaxhar's spaceship, rescue Susan, and hot-wire the spaceship's power core, activating the self-destruct sequence. During their escape, Susan is cut off from her friends, who are trapped in the power core. They tell her to save herself, but Susan instead finds Gallaxhar, who is trying to escape with the quantonium. She tries to force him into releasing her friends, but when he admits he cannot reverse the sequence, Susan instead takes the quantonium, restoring herself to huge size and saving her friends. The monsters leap out of the exploding spaceship and are rescued by General Monger on the back of the transformed Insectosaurus, who has metamorphed into a butterfly, while Gallaxhar is trapped, when his escape pod deactivates, and dies in the explosion.

The monsters receive a hero's welcome home. Derek tries to get back with Susan, since now it would benefit his career, but Susan rejects and humiliates him by throwing him in the air to be caught, swallowed, and spat out by B.O.B. on camera. The monsters are then alerted to a huge snail named Escargantua attacking Paris and they fly off to face the new menace.

Cast and characters

Monsters

Reese Witherspoon at the British premiere of the film.

• Reese Witherspoon as Susan Murphy/Ginormica, a normal young woman who is struck by a radioactive meteor on her wedding day, causing her to mutate and grow to a height of 49 feet 11 inches (15.21 m). Meek and unassertive, she just wants to return to her old life. In addition to her size, she is amazingly strong and has a resistance to energy attacks.
• Seth Rogen as B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), an indestructible gelatinous mass created when a genetically-altered tomato (which he referred to in the Halloween special as his mother) was injected with a chemically-altered ranch dessert topping. His greatest strength lies in his ability to digest any substance as well as being indestructible. His one weakness is that his mutation did not give him a brain, making him dimwitted.
• Hugh Laurie as Dr. Cockroach, PhD, a brilliant but mad scientist who, in an experiment to imbue himself with the abilities of a cockroach, ends up with a giant cockroach's head and insect abilities, such as being able to climb walls and a high resistance to physical damage. He is charming and sophisticated in spite of his tendencies to eat garbage and laugh maniacally. He is also an avid dancer.
• Will Arnett as The Missing Link, (often referred to as "Link"), is a 20,000-year-old fish-ape hybrid who was thawed out of an iceberg, only to escape and wreak havoc at his old lagoon habitat. Usually referred to as Link, he behaves as a macho jock most of the time, but is in reality out of shape. Despite this, he is an expert martial-artist.
• Conrad Vernon as Insectosaurus, (often shortened to "Insecto"), formerly a 1 inch (25 mm) grub transformed by nuclear radiation into a 350 foot (110 m) monster with the ability to shoot silk out of his nose. He is unable to speak and is mesmerized by bright lights.

Aliens

• Rainn Wilson as Gallaxhar, the self-proclaimed alien king who hopes to take over Earth. He is served by gigantic robot probes (around the same size as Insectosaurus) and possesses a giant cloning machine.
• Amy Poehler as Gallaxhar's Computer, who follows Gallaxhar's orders, albeit with a sarcastic tone.

Humans

• Kiefer Sutherland as General Warren R. Monger, a military leader who runs a top secret facility, Area 50-Something, where monsters are kept. In a scene during the credits, he claims to be 90 years old, in spite of his youthful appearance.
• Stephen Colbert as President Hathaway, the impulsive and dimwitted President of the United States.
• Paul Rudd as Derek Dietl, a local weatherman and Susan's ex-fiancé. He jumps at whatever opportunity he has to boost his career.
• Jeffrey Tambor as Carl Murphy, Susan's overemotional father.
• Julie White as Wendy Murphy, Susan's loving mother.
• Renée Zellweger as Katie, an adventurous human girl. Her date with her boyfriend Cuthbert is interrupted by the landing of Gallaxhar's robot.
• John Krasinski as Cuthbert, Katie's more timid boyfriend.
• Ed Helms as News Reporter
• David Koch as newsreader who comically notes how aliens only ever seem to appear in America (voice-over only in the Australian edit).

Production

The film started as an adaptation of a horror comic book, Rex Havoc,^[4] in which a monster hunter Rex and his team of experts called "Ass-Kickers of the Fantastic" fight against ghouls, ghosts and other creatures.^[5] The earliest development goes back to 2002, when DreamWorks first filed for a Rex Havoc trademark.^[6] 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.^[4] In the following years, the film's story diverged away from the original Rex Havoc, with directors Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman ending up creating the storyline from scratch.^[7]

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. Director Conrad Vernon added that he found it would be a great idea to take hideous monsters and giving them personalities and satirizing the archetypes.^[8] Each of the five monsters has DNA traceable to sci-fi/horror B movies from the 1950s, '60s and '70s, although none is a mere copy of an older character.^[9] Susan, who grows to be 49 feet 11 inches tall, was inspired by Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Dr. Cockroach represents The Fly and The Curse of Frankenstein, while B.O.B. is an amalgam of slithering and slimy characters that were featured in the films, including The Blob and The Crawling Eye. Insectosaurus, a 350-foot-tall monster, is a nod to a 1961 Japanese film Mothra. According to Vernon, the Missing Link has no direct inspiration. He "just represents anything prehistoric that comes back to life and terrorizes people."^[9] For the San Francisco sequence, the producers researched lots of films and photographs for an accurate depiction of the city, and filmed animator Line Andersen, which had a similar body type to Ginormica - tall, thin, 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.^[8]

Ed Leonard, CTO of DreamWorks Animation, says it took approximately 45.6 million computing hours to make Monsters vs. Aliens, more than eight times as many as the original Shrek. Several hundred Hewlett-Packard xw8600 workstations were used, along with a large and powerful 'render farm' of HP ProLiant blade servers with over 9,000 server processor cores, to process the animation sequence. The movie demanded 120 terabytes of data to complete, with one explosion scene alone requiring 6 TB.^[10]

Since Monsters vs. Aliens, all feature films released by DreamWorks Animation are produced in a stereoscopic 3-D format, using Intel's InTru3D technology.^[11] IMAX 3D, RealD and 2D versions were released.

Release

Marketing

To promote the 3-D technology that is used in Monsters vs. Aliens, DreamWorks ran a 3-D trailer before halftime in the U.S. broadcast of Super Bowl XLIII on February 1, 2009. Due to the limitations of current television technology, ColorCode 3D glasses were distributed at SoBe stands at major national grocers. The Monsters, except Susan and Insectosaurus, also appeared in a 3-D SoBe commercial airing after the trailer. Bank of America gave away vouchers which covered the cost of an upgrade to a 3-D theatrical viewing of the film for its customers.^[12]

Home media

Monsters vs. Aliens was released to DVD and Blu-ray in the US and Canada on September 29, 2009 and on October 26, 2009 in the UK. The home release for both the DVD and Blu-ray format only contain the 2D version of the movie. However, the release is packaged with a new short, B.O.B.'s Big Break, which is the more traditional 3D that required green and magenta glasses.^[13] Also included are four pairs of 3D glasses.^[13] On January 6, 2010, it was announced that a 3D version will be released on Blu-ray.^[14] On February 24, a tentative March release date was set for the UK, where anyone who buys a Samsung 3D TV or 3D Blu-ray player will get a copy.^[15] On March 8, it was reported that the 3D Blu-ray will be released in the United States, also with Samsung 3D products, on March 21.^[16]

Reception

Critical reception

The film received generally favorable reviews. Based on 209 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, Monsters vs. Aliens has an overall approval rating from critics of 72%, with an average score of 6.4/10.^[3] Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 top reviews from mainstream critics, the film has received an average score of 56, based on 35 reviews.^[17] Roger Ebert gave the film a mixed review, saying "I suppose kids will like this movie", but said "I didn't find [it] rich with humor."

Box office

On its opening weekend, the film opened at No. 1, grossing $59.3 million in 4,104 theaters.^[18] Of that total, the film grossed an estimated $5.2 million in IMAX theaters, becoming the 5th highest-grossing IMAX debut, behind Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Dark Knight and Watchmen.^[19] The movie made $198,351,526 in the United States and Canada making it the second-highest grossing animated movie behind Up. Worldwide, it is the third-highest grossing animated film of 2009 with a total of $381,509,870 behind Up and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs.

Awards

In 2009, the film was nominated for four Annie Awards, including Voice Acting in a Feature Production for Hugh Laurie.^[20] Reese Witherspoon and Seth Rogen were both nominated for best voice actor at the 2010 Kids' Choice Awards for voicing Susan and B.O.B,^[21] but lost to Jim Carrey for Disney's A Christmas Carol.^[22] Monsters vs. Aliens was also nominated for Best Animated film but lost to Up.^[22] On June 24, 2009 the film won the Saturn Award for Best Animated Film.^[23]

Soundtrack

Track listing:^[26][27]

Other media

Beside the main film, Monsters vs. Aliens franchise also includes a video game, a short film B.O.B.'s Big Break, and two television specials, Monsters vs. Aliens: Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space and Night of the Living Carrots. A TV series based on the film started airing on Nickelodeon on March 23, 2013, which was cancelled after one season due to low ratings and the network's plans to refocus on more "Nickish" shows.^[28]

References

External links

• Official website
• Monsters vs. Aliens at the Internet Movie Database
• Monsters vs. Aliens at the Big Cartoon DataBase
• Monsters vs. Aliens at AllMovie
• Monsters vs. Aliens at Rotten Tomatoes
• Monsters vs. Aliens at Metacritic
• Monsters vs. Aliens at Box Office Mojo