Monsters vs Aliens

This enjoyable adventure doesn’t quite do what it says on the tin, writes Donald Clarke

MONSTERS vs Aliensis fun. How could it not be? It's called Monsters vs Aliens, and it features a giant woman called Susan and a blue gelatinous blob with Seth Rogen's voice. It's not as if it's called Benjamin Button vs Watchmen.

It’s not as if it’s got Gwyneth Paltrow in it. So, it’s fun. But it is, somehow, not quite as much fun as it ought to be.

The latest animated feature from DreamWorks begins with a happy young woman (Reese Witherspoon) looking forward to her marriage. Before the nuptials can take place, she is hit by a glowing meteorite and transformed into a two-storey version of her usual self.

Following capture by the government, Ginormica, as Susan is henceforth to be known, finds herself banged up with an ambulatory turquoise blob, a smart- mouthed lizard-thing, a genuinely creepy giant insect, and a mad scientist with a cockroach’s head. The military boffins intend to keep all these embarrassing mutants isolated from an ignorant public, but when aliens attack the monsters are asked to do their bit.

The DreamWorks team have done a good job of refining and distorting science fiction visions from (when else?) the 1950s. The film is all white-picket fences, huge-headed alien geniuses and metal robots that look like they were fashioned from discarded plumbing. The 3-D version (more memories of the Eisenhower era) finds enough opportunities to poke us in the eye, and there is a welcome dearth of sentimentality.

So why does it feel a little unsatisfactory? Well, there is that title. With its echoes of the legendary Japanese epic Destroy All Monsters, "Monsters vs Aliens" conjures up images of a million variously horrific creatures blowing each other's heads off with antique laser cannons. As it happens, the picture, for all its moments of anarchy, quickly resolves itself into yet another digital forum in which animated wiseguys make smart cracks at one another.

And some of those gags really are quite painful. “It feels hotter,” the lizard-thing says after several millennia away from the fresh air. “Is it getting hotter? That would be a convenient truth to know.”

Destroy all screenwriters!

Directed by Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman. Voices of Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Kiefer Sutherland, Stephen Colbert PG cert, gen release, 94 min★★★