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The 3-D FILM Monsters vs. Aliens AN EYE-POPPING EXPERIENCE
By Matt Stringer

Growing up, Kiefer Sutherland’s daughter, Sarah Jude, 21, loved Winnie the Pooh and it would run, no pun intended, on a 24-hour cycle. She would watch it over and over. Not only that but she would often lean forward in front of the television and try to talk the characters out of doing something you know they should avoid.

“She would sit there and she’d go ‘slow down Piglet’, slow down Piglet, and Piglet would fall in the hole,” Sutherland said. “And she would say ‘I told you to slow down.’ And she would have these unbelievable conversations with the movie and why it wasn’t changing. She was the reason that I actually started to think that TV, or these kinds of films, would ultimately become interactive.”

Well, Hollywood still hasn’t figured out a way for the audience to actually talk Alice, or Piglet, from falling down the hole, but with Sutherland’s upcoming animated film, Monsters vs. Aliens, DreamWorks has turned the once shoddy, dissapointing and eyestraining concept of 3-D into an eye-popping moviegoing experience that makes the audience feel like the theatre itself is being invaded.

Of course, it might be a tad scary if you were actually in the film since it’s about a group of ragtag monsters freed from a top secret prison to fight off invading aliens led by the creepy Gallaxhar, voiced by Rainn Wilson, who plays The Office’s Dwight Schrute.

“Is Gallaxhar, the evil alien warlord, anything like the paper salesman? Yes, actually,” Wilson said. “They both have a megalomaniacal streak. I would say that's where the similarity ends. One of them has six legs, four eyes and is part squid.”

Wilson’s son Walter, 4, like all children loves animated films and this one is sure to blow his mind when it seems the characters might actually reach out and touch someone.

“This is going to blow his mind,” Wilson said. “His little brain is going to be blown by this movie and hearing his dada’s voice in the body of a half squid, weird, evil alien.”

The film is centered around California girl Susan Murphy, voiced by Reese Witherspoon, who is unwittingly clobbered by a meteor full of outer space gunk on her wedding day and mysteriously grows to 49-feet-11-inches tall.

The military jumps into action and Susan is captured and secreted away to a covert government compound. There, she is renamed Ginormica and placed in confinement with a ragtag group of monsters: the brilliant but insect-headed Dr. Cockroach, Ph.D.; the macho half-ape, half-fish The Missing Link; the gelatinous and indestructible B.O.B.; and the 350-foot grub called Insectosaurus. 

These are the caged but lovable monsters that are enlisted by Sutherland’s seemingly hard-nosed character General W.R. Monger to save Earth.

“He also really cares about these monsters, even though he pretends under his kind of tough exterior to not,” Sutherland said. “And that really comes out through the entire film. So, just those elements alone made the character interesting. And then on a general level, I thought the story was unbelievably funny but I also found it really touching. I was actually really excited to be making a film that was obviously designed for children, but that an adult could tolerate, because I think the movies for children now are so vastly different than, for instance, the Disney movies that I would watch as a child. The thing about all of those movies was that there was such a strong moral to those stories that it felt like you were almost in class on some level.”

But this movie is not without a message at the very least for children, says Will Arnett, best known as playing George Oscar “G.O.B.” Bluth II on the Emmy Award-sinning series Arrested Development.

“I think what kids takeaway is about acceptance at the end of the day and how everybody is just looking to be accepted, Arnett said. “We are all different. And people may be different from us but that doesn’t necessarily make them bad. And I think that’s what really comes across. That’s what I take away from it anyway.”

Matt Stringer is the editor of Curious Parents Magazine.