It was DreamWorks Animation's first feature film to be directly produced in a stereoscopic3D format instead of being converted into 3D after completion, which added $15 million to the film's budget.[6]
In Modesto, California, Susan Murphy prepares for her wedding to weatherman Derek Dietl, who cancels their Paris honeymoon for a career opportunity in Fresno. Just before the ceremony, a meteorite from a destroyed planet lands on her. She initially appears unharmed but, during the ceremony, energy she absorbed from the meteorite causes her to grow fifty feet tall, accidentally destroying the church. A U.S. military detachment quickly arrives to tranquilize and capture her. Susan awakens in a top-secret government facility for monsters, where she meets General W.R. Monger, the Army officer in charge of the facility, and her fellow inmates: Dr. Herbert Cockroach Ph.D., a scientist turned human-cockroach hybrid; B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), a live, brainless, indestructible mass of blue goo; the Missing Link, a prehistoric 20,000-year-old fish-ape hybrid; and Insectosaurus, a 350-foot-tall bug mutated by nuclear radiation. Susan is renamed "Ginormica" by the government and is forbidden any contact with her friends and family.
Meanwhile, faraway on his mysterious spaceship, Gallaxhar, a squid-like extraterrestrial overlord is alerted to the presence of "Quantonium", a powerful substance, on Earth; he sends a gigantic robotic retrieval probe. When it lands, the President of the United States attempts first contact by playing "Axel F" on a keyboard; the machine simply goes on a destructive attack straight towards San Francisco, unaffected by the military's attempts to destroy it. Monger convinces the President to grant the monsters their freedom if they can stop the robot. In San Francisco, the probe detects the Quantonium within Ginormica's body and targets her. The monsters finally manage to destroy it at the Golden Gate Bridge, using parts of the bridge itself, so the government sets them free.
Gallaxhar sets a course for Earth to obtain the Quantonium himself while the now-free Ginormica returns home with her new friends and reunites with her parents. While the monsters cause some havoc due to their lack of social experience, she tries to reunite with Derek but he breaks off their engagement, believing she would overshadow his career. Initially heartbroken, Ginormica soon realizes that her life was better as a monster and embraces her new self. Suddenly, Gallaxhar's ship arrives and uses a tractor beam to pull Ginormica onboard; Insectosaurus is seemingly shot and killed when he tries to intervene.
Enraged by her friend's death, Ginormica quickly breaches containment and chases Gallaxhar, but he traps her in a machine that extracts the Quantonium from her body, shrinking her back to her original size. Gallaxhar then uses the extracted Quantonium to create clones of himself in order to launch a full-scale invasion of Earth. Monger manages to get B.O.B, Link, and Dr. Cockroach onto the ship, where they rescue Ginormica and make their way to the main power core where Dr. Cockroach sets the ship to self-destruct to prevent the invasion. Confronting Gallaxhar on the bridge as he tries to escape, Ginormica sends reabsorbs the Quantonium, restoring her monstrous size and strength. Rescuing her friends, they flee the ship and are rescued by Monger and Insectosaurus, now metamorphosed into a butterfly. The ship then self-destructs, killing Gallaxhar and his army.
Returning to Modesto, Ginormica, B.O.B, Dr. Cockroach, Link, and Butterflyosaurus receive a hero's welcome. Hoping to give himself a career boost, Derek tries to get back with Susan, but she rejects and humiliates him live on TV. Monger informs the monsters that a monstrous snail named "Escargantua," mutated from falling into a French nuclear reactor, is slowly making its way to Paris, so the heroes head out to confront the new menace.
Reese Witherspoon at the British premiere of the film.
Reese Witherspoon as Susan Murphy / Ginormica, a young woman from Modesto, California who is hit by a radioactive quantonium meteorite on her wedding day, causing her to change drastically and grow to a 49feet 11inches (15.21m) giantess. Her exposure to quantonium also makes her hair color change from brown to white and gives her super-strength and physical imperviousness.
Seth Rogen as B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), an indestructible gelatinous mass created when a tomato was injected with a genetically modified ranch-flavored dessert topping. He can devour and digest almost any substance. Despite having consciousness, he literally and figuratively lacks a brain and is thus the comic relief.
Hugh Laurie as Dr. Herbert Cockroach Ph.D., a brilliant scientist who attempted to imbue himself with the resilience and abilities of a cockroach, with the side effect of his head becoming that of a human-sized cockroach.
Will Arnett as The Missing Link (usually referred to as "Link"), a 20,000-year-old fish-ape humanoid who was found frozen and thawed out by scientists, only to escape and wreak havoc at his old lagoon habitat of Cocoa Beach, Florida.
Jimmy Kimmel as Insectosaurus,[9]formerly a 1 inch (25mm)grub transformed and mutated by nuclear radiation into a 350 foot (106.7 m) monster with the ability to shoot silk out of his nose. He is unable to speak clearly and is mesmerized by bright light. He has a close bond with Link, who can understand what he's saying.
Rainn Wilson as Gallaxhar, an evil alien overlord intent on collecting quantonium – the substance that transformed Susan into Ginormica – to give his cloning machine enough power to generate an army of clones of himself to conquer Earth. He is served by gigantic robotic probes. He claims to have suffered several traumas in his youth (which are left mostly unintelligible to the viewer, due to him telling Ginormica his story while being repeatedly photocopied to create his clones), driving him to destroy his own homeworld, and plans to make a new one on Earth.
Kiefer Sutherland as General W. R. Monger, a military leader who runs a top-secret facility where monsters are kept, it is his plan to fight the invading aliens with the imprisoned monsters in exchange for their freedom. In a scene during the credits, he claims to be 90 years old, in spite of his youthful appearance.
Stephen Colbert as President Hathaway, the impulsive and rather dimwitted president of the United States. Not wanting to be remembered as "the President in office when the world came to an end", he agrees with General Monger's "Monsters vs. Aliens" plan when the U.S. Military is unable to defeat the robot probe sent by Gallaxhar.
Paul Rudd as Derek Dietl, a megalomaniac local weatherman and Susan's supposed fiancé. He jumps at whatever opportunity he has to boost his career, which causes him to place his job and himself before his relationship with Susan, canceling their plans to have a romantic honeymoon in Paris to land an anchorman job in Fresno, California and eventually ending their engagement.
Jeffrey Tambor as Carl Murphy, Susan's overemotional father.
Julie White as Wendy Murphy, Susan's loving mother.
Renée Zellweger as Katie, a woman whose date with her boyfriend Cuthbert is interrupted by the landing of Gallaxhar's robot.
David James Koch provided the voice for the character for the Australian release of the film.[10][11]
Production
The film started as an adaptation of a horror comic book, Rex Havoc,[12] in which a monster hunter Rex and his team of experts called "Ass-Kickers of the Fantastic" fight against ghouls, ghosts and other creatures.[13] The earliest development goes back to 2002, when DreamWorks first filed for a Rex Havoc trademark.[14] In a plot synopsis revealed in 2005, Rex was to assemble a team of monsters, including Ick!, Dr. Cockroach, the 50,000 Pound Woman and Insectosaurus, to fight aliens for disrupting cable TV service.[12] In the following years, the film's story diverged away from the original Rex Havoc, with directors Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman finally creating the storyline from scratch. Letterman would also co-write the film's screenplay with husband and wife duo Maya Forbes and Wally Wolodarsky, and screenwriting duo Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger.[15]
Production designer David James stated that the film is "a return to what made us nerds in the first place," getting classic movie monsters and relaunching them in a contemporary setting. Director Conrad Vernon added that he found it would be a great idea to take hideous monsters and give them personalities and satirize the archetypes.[16] Each of the five monsters has traits traceable to sci-fi/horror B movies from the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s, although none is a mere copy of an older character.[17] Susan/Ginormica, who grows to be 49 feet 11 inches tall, was inspired by Attack of the 50 Foot Woman. Dr. Cockroach represents The Fly and The Curse of Frankenstein, while B.O.B. is an amalgam of slithering and slimy characters that were featured in the films, including The Blob and The Crawling Eye. Insectosaurus, a 350-foot-tall monster, is a nod to the 1961 Kaiju film Mothra. According to Vernon, the Missing Link has no direct inspiration. He "just represents anything prehistoric that comes back to life and terrorizes people."[17] For the San Francisco sequence, the producers researched many films and photographs for an accurate depiction of the city, and filmed animator Line Andersen, who had a similar body type to Ginormica—tall, thin, and athletic-looking—walking alongside a scale model of San Francisco, to capture better how a person not comfortable with being too big with an environment would walk around it.[16]
Ed Leonard, CTO of DreamWorks Animation, says it took approximately 45.6 million computing hours to make Monsters vs. Aliens, more than eight times as many as the original Shrek. Several hundred Hewlett-Packard xw8600 workstations were used, along with a 'render farm' of HP ProLiant blade servers with over 9,000 server processor cores, to process the animation sequence. Animators used 120 terabytes of data to complete the film. They used 6 TB for an explosion scene.[18]
Starting with Monsters vs. Aliens, all feature films released by DreamWorks Animation were produced in a stereoscopic 3D format, using Intel's InTru3D technology.[19] 2D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, and 4DX versions were released.
Release
Marketing
To promote the 3D technology that is used in Monsters vs. Aliens, DreamWorks ran a 3D trailer before halftime in the U.S. broadcast of Super Bowl XLIII on February 1, 2009. Due to the limitations of television technology at the time, ColorCode 3-D glasses were distributed at SoBe stands at major national grocers. The Monsters, except Ginormica and Insectosaurus, also appeared in a 3D SoBe commercial airing after the trailer. Bank of America gave away vouchers that covered the cost of an upgrade to a 3D theatrical viewing of the film for its customers.[20]
Home media
Monsters vs. Aliens was released to DVD and Blu-ray in the United States and Canada on September 29, 2009, and on October 26, 2009, in the United Kingdom. The home release for both the DVD and Blu-ray format only contains the 2D version of the movie. However, the release is packaged with a new short, B.O.B.'s Big Break, which is in the anaglyphic 3D format that requires red and cyan glasses.[21] Also included are four pairs of 3D glasses.[21] On January 6, 2010, it was announced that a 3D version would be released on Blu-ray.[22] On February 24, a tentative March release date was set for the United Kingdom, where anyone who buys a Samsung 3D TV or 3D Blu-ray player will get a copy.[23] On March 8, it was reported that the 3D Blu-ray would be released in the United States, also with Samsung 3D products, on March 21.[24] As of February 2011, 9.0 million home entertainment units were sold worldwide.[25] In July 2014, the film's distribution rights were purchased by DreamWorks Animation from Paramount Pictures and transferred to 20th Century Fox; the rights are now owned by Universal Pictures following its parent company NBCUniversal's acquisition of DreamWorks Animation in 2016, and the expiration of their distribution deal with 20th Century Fox in 2017.[26]
Reception
Box office
On its opening weekend, the film opened at number 1, grossing $59.3 million in 4,104 theaters.[27] Of that total, the film grossed an estimated $5.2 million in IMAX 3D theatres, becoming the fifth-highest-grossing IMAX 3D debut, behind Star Trek, Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen, The Dark Knight, and Watchmen.[28] The film grossed $198.4 million in the United States and Canada, making it the second-highest-grossing animated movie of the year in these regions behind Up. Worldwide, it is the third highest-grossing animated film of 2009 with a total of $381.7 million behind Up and Ice Age: Dawn of the Dinosaurs. It was the highest-grossing film worldwide in Witherspoon's career until Sing overtook it in 2017.[29]
Critical response
Based on 217 reviews collected by Rotten Tomatoes, Monsters vs. Aliens has an overall approval rating from critics of 73% and an average score of 6.5/10. The critical consensus reads: "Though it doesn't approach the depth of the best-animated films, Monsters vs. Aliens has enough humor and special effects to entertain moviegoers of all ages."[30] On Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating from mainstream critics, the film has received a score of 56 out of 100 based on 35 reviews, which indicates "mixed or average reviews".[31] Audiences polled by CinemaScore gave the film an A− grade, on an A+ to F scale.[32]
Roger Ebert of the Chicago Sun-Times gave the film two and a half stars out of four, writing, "I suppose kids will like this movie", though he "didn't find [it] rich with humor".[33]Peter Travers of Rolling Stone gave the film three-and-a-half stars out of four and wrote that "WALL-E had more charm, more soul, more everything. But there's enough merry mischief here to satisfy, even if you're way past puberty."[34]
In April 2011, DreamWorks Animation CEO Jeffrey Katzenberg commented that the studio did not have plans to produce future movie-genre parodies like Megamind (2010), Monsters vs. Aliens, and Shark Tale (2004), nor sequels to these, saying that these films "all shared an approach and tone and idea of parody, and did not travel well internationally. We don't have anything like that coming on our schedule now."[41]
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