MovieChat Forums > The Monster (2016) Discussion > so much potential...

so much potential...

posted 8 years ago by shelliiaae
1 reply | jump to latest

When I saw this and read the plot, I was SO excited! Started off decent enough, however you get to about the 44 minute mark without seeing ANYTHING!!!! You have no clue it's even a monster movie until almost an hour in. Once the mother was trying to calm the daughter laying in the car because the monster is outside I honestly found myself starting to skip scenes...15 seconds here, one or two minutes there...kind of sad really..I was really starting to get bored...

The movie only has 2 real characters in it, and usually I LOVE that type of horror, I also love isolation horror so this could have been so amazing.

They did a pretty good job actually on the monster!!! Although I felt it'd have fit better in some kind of of a "science lab gone wrong" setting, or ever people camping in the woods, either way the monster was really good...

Then comes the mother..this is kind of (I guess...?) a movie of redemption about the mother ...but in reality you can't feel sorry for the mom at all!!! When she starts screaming F you! to her daughter before her play...and then again when it shows her actually smack her daughter in the face over her BF it made it VERY hard to feel for the mom, and it hurt the movie for me...in no way at all did she redeem herself. The entire conflict between the daughter and mother didn't even need to happen for it to have anything to do with the movie, it just made us hate the mother, and hope she gets eaten lol.

Could've easily been a 9/10 for a monster movie, but due to the dreadfully slow plot, and the character that was too easy to hate...5/10

[–] plastiqscott 8 years ago

The fact that the mom was so hated is a triumph for the acting/directing/writing, think about it.

The only flaw was the moms sacrifice at the end. Even if regarded as a metaphor, it is over shadowed by how unbelievable of a choice it was -- unless that is some metaphor too (scoff). Could have been a 9/10 if her sacrifice held any value (subjective i know). I give the film a 7/10 because of that one story decision, but then again, there was weak writing/dialogue elsewhere in the film; "It's going to rain", "I hate thunder", "yea i know you do" -- sophomoric Highschool dialogue. The writing recovers with the wide variety of emotions from the flashbacks, for instance, when the mom slaps the daughter, the daughter cries in some sort of apologetic way, rather than in anger. Though I attribute this to directing and acting. Again, the dialogue in the film blows -- granted, it is a horror film (heh).

As for the film being a metaphor movie like The Babadook, i really disagree, if it was, it failed. All themes were laid out on the table. No digging required.

And again, the fact that you hated the mom so much only shows that the film succeeded in some sense. Think about how Mel Gibson made his audience want to dislike Mayans in Apocalypto - har har. The interesting dilemma I had with the Mom / Daughter relationship was though I hated the mom, I wanted her to live for the sake of her Daughter.

I would have preferred this film to have just been a strict horror film, though very few films are these days, Art House Horror is all the rave. If it had been a strict horror film it would have just been something similar to Penny Dreadful (the movie) with a monster...actually, that would have been cool :)

Bryan Bertino almost nailed it with this one...