"Paul"

In Paul, Greg Motolla’s new high-concept alien comedy, Seth Rogen plays a wisecracking, pot-smoking visitor from the Andromeda galaxy. If that premise sounds terrible, then you’ll probably want to steer clear. Your enjoyment of this movie is almost entirely dependent on whether you like its star’s personality, though I can’t imagine any science-fiction fan not having at least a little bit of fun.

The film reunites Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the dynamic British duo from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. They play Graeme and Clive, two aging fanboys who embark on a tour of the U.S. after attending Comic Con. The script – co-written by Pegg and Frost, former roommates who grew up loving Star Wars – is an affectionate skewering of comic-book culture. There’s an air of self-parody to the Ewok T-shirts and geeky film references.

The adventure begins when Graeme and Clive meet Paul, an alien visitor who’s just escaped from the U.S. government after decades of captivity. The extraterrestrial has Rogen’s distinctive, laidback-stoner voice, but the big guy is never physically in the movie; this is a completely digital creation, like Gollum and Jar-Jar Binks. Actor Joe Lo Truglio studied tapes of Rogen and delivered the lines on set, and then Rogen recorded the dialogue in post-production. The effect is like seeing a Seth Rogen performance while never actually seeing Seth Rogen.

If Paul looks a little, uh, familiar – little green dude, big eyes, bald head – it’s because, as the alien explains, “the human race has been drip-fed images of my face on lunchboxes and T-shirts in case our species meet you don’t have a spaz attack.” This concept – that Paul has had a hand, Forrest Gump-style, in the shaping of post-war American history – gives the filmmakers a license to tickle our funny bone. Paul claims he came up with the idea for E.T. and Agent Mulder of The X-Files, and says the weed he gets from the Pentagon killed Dylan…

Graeme: Bob Dylan isn’t dead!
Paul: *knowing smile* Isn’t he?

I was surprised by the degree to which the filmmakers got me emotionally involved. Paul is not only funny, he’s endearing; his eyes make a cute little squishy sound when he blinks. Mottola, Pegg and Frost embrace Spielbergian sentimentality, and they mostly get away with it, even though David Arnold’s music lays it on a bit thick for my taste. There's a healthy dose of subversiveness to go along with the sentiment. This is the second British invasion comedy in recent years to take an explicitly pro-atheist stance. The other is The Invention of Lying, and if that film isn’t as well made as Paul, it’s equally astonishing and audacious.

Paul has the power to transfer all his knowledge of the universe just by reaching out and touching someone. This ability comes in handy when he meets Ruth (Kristen Wiig), a creationist who believes the Earth is 4,000 years old. (She wears a T-shirt depicting Jesus shooting Charles Darwin in the head.) Ruth has the most complex character arc in the movie, and Wiig makes the most of it; she brings genuine poignancy to the moment near the end of the film when Ruth tells Paul, “You didn’t frighten me, you freed me.”

Sci-fi fans will have a lot of fun picking out references to Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Back to the Future, and even those who don’t enjoy Rogen’s performance (for the record, I like the guy just fine) will have plenty to appreciate in the acting department. Mottola (The Daytrippers, Superbad, Adventureland) is one of our greatest directors of ensemble comedies, and he’s surrounded his digitally rendered main character with a cast of likeable performers – including Bill Hader, Jeffrey Tambor, Jane Lynch and Blythe Danner. You gotta love the moment when Danner’s character, seeing that her farm is being destroyed in a fire, cries out, “My weed!”

"Monsters"

Like District 9, Gareth Edwards’ Monsters is a monster movie that takes place several years after aliens have landed on Earth. District 9 had a budget of $30 million; Monsters cost a fraction of that ($500,000), but you wouldn’t know by looking at it. The movie is a masterpiece of economy filmmaking and a prime example of just how much a resourceful independent filmmaker can accomplish these days.

The movie takes place in a speculative near-future, when the entire northern part of Mexico has been quarantined and the U.S.-Mexico border has been sealed with a fortified wall to keep out extraterrestrial “creatures”. A war photographer (Scoot McNairy) is paid a hefty sum to escort a wealthy American expatriate (Whitney Able) from Central America back to the States. To complete the journey, they must travel through the Infected Zone, where alien behemoths that look like elephants crossed with squids roam freely.

Like Robert Rodriguez, Edwards is a multi-hyphenate filmmaker. Traveling with his two lead actors and a 5-man crew, he shot the movie himself in Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. He filmed in flooded areas and disasters zones, including a neighborhood in Galveston, Texas, that had been destroyed by Hurricane Ike. Like the great documentarians, Edwards knows how to make the most of his surroundings. The landscape looks like it’s been ravaged by alien invaders, but no, the filmmakers simply shot on location in areas that suited their purposes.

Even more astonishing is what Edwards achieved during post-production. Using readily available computer programs like Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, he painted in helicopters, road signs, mountains and a towering border fence. In an amazing nighttime scene, a sea creature pulls a downed plane beneath the surface; the effects in that scene were accomplished in the director’s bathtub using a toy plane and a Mag-Lite. The design of the creatures is jaw-dropping. Whereas Steven Spielberg delayed showing the monster in Jaws because he thought the shark looked fake, Edwards shows the creatures right away, in a stunning roadside attack that opens the film. Monsters shows how far visuals effects technology has advanced in the 35 years since Spielberg’s creature-feature blockbuster.

Able and McNairy have good chemistry (they’re married in real life), but the real star is Edwards. No wonder why he’s been hired to direct the new big-budget reboot of Godzilla. His low-budget indie can be viewed as a straight monster movie or as an allegory for immigration and the devastating effects of natural disasters in the Third World’s most vulnerable areas. It’s no big surprise that the “monsters” to which the title refers turn out to be entirely human.