Love and Monsters

I just watched the Netflix adventure movie Love and Monsters.  It was great, in no small part because of the superb job done by the lead actor.  There are two things it did well though, and I wanted to comment on them because so few movies get them right.  The two things it did best were monsters... and love.

There will be a spoiler warning halfway through.

First, Monsters.  Love and Monsters is set in the near future in a world where monsters arose from a freak weapons accident and smashed human civilization.  Scattered remnants of humans live in hiding but monsters walk the world freely.  The reasoning given for the monsters was kind of silly from a scientific perspective, but I am totally willing to forgive that.  The important thing is that There Are Monsters, and I just ask that the movie tell me a story from that.

Mostly movies fail at this sort of thing.  They write themselves into corners and then get out with ridiculous Deus Ex Machina endings or insert senseless MacGuffins into the plot to cover for their shortcomings in writing and planning.  You have to strike the right middle ground where you continue to reveal things about the world you have created without making the things you have said previously seem silly.  Each new reveal in a science fiction story should follow from the previous one such that the viewer says "Oh, okay, I see how that would be.  Makes sense."  even if they wouldn't have *predicted* that reveal.

That is the key there.  You want to surprise people a bit, keep them guessing, but you want everything to fit together in the end in a logical manner.  After all the reveals are done, the characters need to have made reasonable choices given the world in which they live.  Love and Monsters does a great job of this.  Throughout the movie you learn more about the monsters and how the world works, and each time it all fits together with what you learned previously.  I couldn't have told you what the final act would look like, but it fits cleanly into the rest of the story so far.

I can accept all kinds of nutty stuff (space wizards with laser swords come to mind) as long as the rest of the story follows sensibly from there.

Now we get into spoilers as we talk about Love.

Twu Wuv appears way too much in movies.  I particularly object to it because of the built in assumptions of exclusivity and eternal duration, but also I think it doesn't well reflect how actual people work.  Relationships are messy, and that messiness does not have to detract from their beauty.

The hero of the story, Joel, is a guy with a crush.  Before the monsters he was dating Aimee and they were in love.  Then monsters came and they were separated by a huge tract of monster infested world.  Seven years pass, and Joel is still desperately in love with Aimee even though he has only spoken to her over a radio a couple of times since.  He has put her up on a pedestal so high that he has convinced himself that he can never be happy without her.

So he suits up and marches across more than one hundred kilometers of monster filled territory to find her.  Without a decent map, a compass, or any sense of how to survive.  This is idiotic, obviously, but it is exactly how lovesick, desperate people behave.  Grand romantic gesture!  Find my Twu Wuv or die in the attempt!

Naturally since Joel is the hero he makes it.  Many trials and much learning occur on the way, of course, because it is an adventure movie, but finally Joel arrives at Aimee's doorstep.

This is the point in a bad movie where they would kiss and reunite and Twu Wuv would make all the problems go away.

But not here!  Joel arrives and finds out that Aimee has moved on.  She still thinks of him fondly, you know, as that guy who she dated in high school who was a real sweetie.  But this whole "I would walk 500 miles" schtick is WAY too much for her.  She has her own life now, and while she is duly impressed by his feat, that isn't changing her mind.

Love and Monsters doesn't try to paint one of them as bad and wrong.  They realize the mixup, both feel kinda bad about the whole thing, and try to muddle along.  I love the idea that love doesn't have to 'work out' or be about betrayal and villainy.  It can just be a thing that is there, and we can empathize with the struggles of the heroes without a canned, predictable conclusion.

More adventure happens, and finally Joel goes back home.  His choice to risk his life mattered, both for his own group and Aimee's.  He learned things and got better, and more importantly he learned to value the things he already had like friendship, instead of pinning his hopes on Twu Wuv with someone he barely even knew.

Maybe someday those two do end up in a relationship.  The ending doesn't prevent that, it just has them in different places, on different courses.  It leaves them like real people, in a spot where even if you love someone or lust after someone you don't have to choose between Twu Wuv or Only Friends or Bitter Enemies.  You can have a thing where there is some love, and fondness, and maybe some lust, and who knows where you end up over the years.

This has immense appeal to me.

Relationships are complicated, and they can be good and fulfilling even if they look nothing like a fairy tale.  I enjoy when movies acknowledge that, and give us some stories that reflect the complexity of real life.

Joel is a character I can believe.  Aimee is a great complement to him, especially because she isn't some damsel in distress that he 'wins' - she is doing her own thing, has her own agenda, and gets her moments of bravery and heroism too.

I want more science fiction like this, where a logically coherent world evolves out of a simple twist.  I want more love stories like this, where people struggle with love in a complicated situation and find paths to happiness that aren't Twu Wuv.  

This was a great movie, and you should watch it.