OVP: Love and Monsters (2020)

Film: Love and Monsters (2020)

Stars: Dylan O'Brien, Jessica Henwick, Michael Rooker, Dan Ewing, Ariana Greenblatt

Director: Michael Matthews

Oscar History: 1 nomination (Best Visual Effects)

Snap Judgment Ranking: 3/5 stars

With creating the "My Ballots" articles, one of the things in particular that I've noticed has been the Visual Effects contest becomes tougher the further back that you go.  The category expanded to five-wide in 2010, which means that as I'm crafting "My Ballots" for years prior to that, I'm coming up with a list larger than the Oscars did, meaning I need to do my research.  In some ways, that's the case for the Best Visual Effects category in 2020 for AMPAS, because unlike any other year for the past decade, this year's contenders were from a much smaller list of films.  You saw that with the shortlist, and you saw that with the nominated pictures.  While movies like Tenet or The Midnight Sky would've been shortlisted, if not nominated, in a normal year, other movies like Bloodshot or The One and Only Ivan would've been afterthoughts, not movies you'd even consider for the prize.  Perhaps no film encapsulates that ethos more than Love and Monsters, a movie with a $30 million budget (a tenth of something like Tenet or Mulan, its nominated rivals), that now sits as a film nominated for the Best Visual Effects trophy in a few weeks.  As it was the only one of the films that I hadn't seen yet, OVP logic demanded I go, but honestly, I would've seen this regardless, as the curiosity of what a "2020 VFX nominee" entails was enough for me to get to this picture.

(Spoilers Ahead) The film takes place in a dystopian future, where Earth is ravaged by monsters that were created after a botched mission to stop an asteroid hitting the planet (plus side: the asteroid didn't destroy the planet).  Joel (O'Brien) is in a hatch with a group of survivors who have largely coupled up (the end of the world comes with a lot of sex, it seems), but his girlfriend Aimee (Henwick) is in a different bunker & Joel freezes up around the monsters, so he can't get to her.  Inspired by a conversation he has with her, though, he goes off trying to find her, and of course along the way he finds a number of monsters, but also some scrappy new friends, including a dog named "Boy" and a talking robot who shows him pictures of his dead parents.  When he gets to Aimee, he helps to thwart an evil plan that some wandering pirates have perpetrated on them, and together he rejoins his old crew, with both Aimee's new group & his group moving into the mountains, which are safer from the monsters.

The movie is not a thinker-this is not an action film that you're going to remember forever, or stand out in the genre.  But it's way better than you'd expect.  O'Brien's comic timing is solid-I didn't watch Teen Wolf and am unfamiliar with his work in the Maze Runner pictures, but I liked him here.  He has a winning affability of a former teen idol who could have a sustained presence in movies if he lands the right role, and while this film's lack of box office deprived him of that, I hope at least Hollywood took notice as he totally elevates a generic monster picture.

That said, the visual effects are pedestrian compared to what we're used to in this category.  25 years ago these would've been cutting edge, but now the creatures don't have the artistry in design we'd expect here, nor the realism.  The giant toad doesn't look much different than what you'd expect in the visual effects of a Mucinex commercial, and even the film's biggest effect (a giant crab for the final showdown between Joel & the pirates) lacks the finesse we'd notice in this category.  I get why this was nominated (it's definitely the rare 2020 film with a lot of CGI effects, which is what this category's bread-and-butter has been for the past two decades), but it's also not as impressive as what you'd see in Mank and certainly not on-par with the genre-leading work in a picture like Tenet.  It is, however, a fun movie.