Netflix’s 'Love and Monsters,' a Review: ‘You don’t have to settle, even at the end of the world.’ Lucy Nield

Netflix’s 'Love and Monsters,' a Review: ‘You don’t have to settle, even at the end of the world.’

Lucy Nield @lucy_nield1

Netflix’s Love and Monsters (2020), promises the viewer a post-apocalyptic adventure, with lashings of romance, community spirit and heroic determination to survive. A comet called Agatha 6-1-6 was heading towards Earth, threatening to kill every living thing on the planet. So in true and predictable human fashion, those in power responded to this threat by launching rockets, nuclear weapons and missiles to prevent the pending collision. Unfortunately, they failed to consider the aftermath of blowing up Agatha, which included a ‘Monsterpocalypse.’

 

The chemical compounds and radiation form the weapons used to obliterate the comet, rained down over the world, infecting insects a various nonhuman animals, causing mutations and exponential growth in size. The mutated creatures displace humans at the top of the food chain, devouring cities and and ruining everything in their path. This lead to 95% of humanity to be wiped out, and forced the remaining 5% to retreat underground, living in small communities called colonies, where they remain in seclusion and safety for 7 years.

 

Protagonist Joel Dawson, played by Maze Runner’s Dylan O’Brien, is a love sick 24 year old. Dawson is living in a colony with a painfully forced family dynamic, and infested with sickeningly sexual couples who appear to be stuck in a perennial state of the ‘honeymoon phase.’ Dawson holds the hand of the viewer, introducing us to this new dystopian world they live beneath. In voice-overs disguised as letters to his pre-Agatha girlfriend Aimee, he gives a synopsis of events that caused this epoch-changing catastrophe. Dawson’s character is designed to be relatable; He fantasies about true love and seeing Aimee again, he is terrified of the monsters outside the safety of his colony, clumsy and he complains about the food - even thought he is in fact the cook. Despite the efforts to make us empathise and see ourselves in the protagonist, Dawson comes across as a generic, hammed-up character who is difficult to connect with at all.

 

Throughout the film, we are introduced to different characters, including a dog, other human survivors, a robot and a variety of monsters. There is a clear, yet strained, attempt in character development, but this attempt falls short due to rushed, over-simplified or wildly unbelievably encounters, leading to zero emotional response from the viewer. Personally, I only empathised with the dog character, ‘Boy,’ due to his achingly human grief in loosing his Master whilst surviving on the surface in the ‘Monsterpocalypse.’

 

This film attempts to explore this dystopian speculative world; invoke uncanny recognitions in human characters as well as monsters or robots; whilst also trying to force us to feel something for Dawson. In following him in his journey to find Aimee and survive life on the surface, the film uses a cocktail of overly-predictable, cliche and dare I say cheesey Rom-Com tropes. Whilst I did enjoy the concept this film is built on, and it did actually have potential to be something new and weird, in it’s attempt to be relatable but unique, as well as, comedic but emotionally serious, the film ends up a bitter disappointment. One could contextualise this film as a metaphor for the end of lockdown. In coming out of the bunkers, going onto the surface world and experiencing it again despite the danger of the Monsters which could be hiding anywhere, this film could be a metaphor for accepting the presence of the pandemic, the months of lockdown we have endured, and facing the agoraphobic type fears and anxieties of re-emering from the safety and seclusion of our own family units or ‘colonies.’ However, I think this is a bit of stretch and probably not what this film is trying to say. Love and Monsters, promised an action filled survival story, based in a different style of post-apocalyptic chaos, however, it provided an uncomfortably feeble attempt to be funny, relatable and romantic.

 

I would recommend Love and Monsters, because the monsters have hilariously stupid names and Boy is a good dog, but do not expect to be wowed in any way by anything else in this film.