Monsters vs Aliens (2009)
Directed by Conrad Vernon
When Susan Murphy is unwittingly clobbered by a meteor full of outer space gunk on her wedding day, she mysteriously grows to 49-feet-11-inches. The military jumps into action and captures Susan, secreting her away to a covert government compound. She is renamed Ginormica and placed in confinement with a ragtag group of Monsters...
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What critics compared Monsters vs Aliens to
Dr. Strangelove or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bomb (1964)
Directed by Stanley Kubrick
Visuals Characters
Surrounding all this is the federal government in its usual chaos, with a President (Stephen Colbert, obviously) who thinks he can negotiate a truce with the music from Close Encounters of the Third Kind and a series of war room scenes that quite deliberately evoke Dr. Strangelove.
Yet, despite the presence of a War Room and a Buck Turgidson-type (named General W.R. Monger, and voiced by Jack Bauer), there's not a hint of Dr. Strangelove to be found.
Of course there are nods to everything pop culture has held dear for the last 60 years, from Star Trek to Dr. Strangelove to the illicit thrill we get from disaster movies that destroy beloved landmarks.
Some of it works quite well, particularly the Dr. Strangelove-inspired scenes in the war room where the U.S. President (Stephen Colbert) is in constant danger of starting nuclear war because the big red launch button looks exactly like the button that produces a cappuccino.
I don�t know whether the directors, Rob Letterman (Shark Tale) and Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2), or the platoon of credited writers grew up on monster and alien flicks.
Monsters vs. Aliens — from DreamWorks Animation vets Rob Letterman (Shark Tale) and Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2) — isn’t trying to be deep: that’s just an unintended side effect (and one the audience can safely ignore, if it wants to) when you riff on just about every monster movie ever made and do it this cleverly, in ways that know you know way too much about the subject of cinematic apocalypse already.
In between scenes of mass destruction directors Rob Letterman (Shark Tale) and Conrad Vernon (Shrek 2), who are working from a script by committee, shell out the comedy with a similarly rapid-fire style, hurling sight gags and puns and throwaway one-liners as if they, too, are in 3-D.
Rob Letterman (writer/director of “Shark Tale”) and Conrad Vernon (director of “Shrek 2”) direct a script that took five writers to bring to the big screen and feels like it was haphazardly constructed like kids playing the story game on a playground.
The screenplay is credited to five people whose combined writing credentials include “The Simpsons,” “King of the Hill,” “The Larry Sanders Show,” and “Kung Fu Panda,” and the directors, Rob Letterman and Conrad Vernon, made “Shark Tale” and “Shrek 2,” respectively.
What directors Rob Letterman, who also wrote and directed “Shark Tale,” and Conrad Vernon, who directed “Shrek 2,” focus on in their first teaming is telling the story, which they both had a hand in creating, with Letterman also participating in the team sport that is the animation screenplay (credit also goes to Maya Forbes, Wally Wolodarsky, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger).
Considering he’s done other amiable voice work in the past (Monsters vs. Aliens, Horton Hears a Who, Kung Fu Panda) it’s not a left field decision, but just like working with Mottola, it does come with a lot of precarious preconceptions.