Monsters vs. Aliens is a 2009 American animated science fiction comedy film directed by Conrad Vernon and Rob Letterman and written by Letterman, Maya Forbes, Wally Wolodarsky, Jonathan Aibel and Glenn Berger. Produced by DreamWorks Animation, it is the first installment in the Monsters vs. Aliens franchise. The film stars Reese Witherspoon, Seth Rogen, Hugh Laurie, Will Arnett, Kiefer Sutherland, Rainn Wilson, Paul Rudd, and Stephen Colbert. The film involves a group of misfit monsters tasked by the United States Armed Forces to stop the invasion of an extraterrestrial villain and save the Earth in exchange for freedom.
It was DreamWorks Animation's first feature film to be produced in a stereoscopic 3D format instead of being converted into 3D after completion, which added $15 million to the film's budget.
Monsters vs. Aliens was released in the United States on March 27, 2009, by Paramount Pictures, to mixed reviews from critics. It was a box-office success, grossing $381 million on a $175 million budget. It was followed by two television specials, Mutant Pumpkins from Outer Space and Night of the Living Carrots, and a television series in 2013.
Plot In Modesto, California, Susan Murphy prepares for her wedding to weatherman Derek Dietl, who switches their honeymoon in Paris, France to Fresno, California for a career opportunity. However, just before the ceremony, a meteorite from a destroyed planet hits her. Susan initially appears unharmed, but during the ceremony, the energy that she absorbed from the meteorite causes her to grow 50 feet and 10 inches(15.49m) 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 89-year-old U.S. Army officer in charge of the facility, and her fellow inmates: Dr. Herbert Cockroach Ph.D., a human-cockroach hybrid scientist; B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), a brainless, indestructible gelatinous mass of blue goo; the Missing Link, a prehistoric 20,000-year-old fish-ape hybrid; and Insectosaurus, a 350-feet(106.68m) 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 a mysterious spaceship, a squid-like extraterrestrial alien overlord named Gallaxhar is alerted to the presence of "Quantonium", a powerful substance, on Earth; he sends a gigantic robotic retrieval alien probe. When it lands, the unintelligent President of the United States, President Hathaway, who is also Monger's boss, attempts first contact by playing "Axel F" on a keyboard, but the machine simply goes on a destructive attack straight towards San Francisco, unaffected by the military's attempts to destroy it. Monger convinces Hathaway 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 manage to destroy the probe at the Golden Gate Bridge by using parts of the bridge, so that the government sets them free.
Gallaxhar sets a course for Earth to obtain the Quantonium himself while Ginormica returns home with her new friends and reunites with her parents. While the monsters cause accidental havoc due to their lack of social experience, Ginormica tries to reunite with Derek, but he breaks off their engagement, believing that she would overshadow his career. Initially heartbroken, Ginormica soon realizes that her life was better as a monster and that she achieved things without Derek involved at all and embraces her new self. Suddenly, Gallaxhar's ship arrives and abducts Ginormica, and Insectosaurus is shot and seemingly killed when he tries to intervene.
Enraged by her friend's supposed death, Ginormica breaks free 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 reabsorbs the Quantonium, restoring her gigantic size and strength. Rescuing her friends, they flee the ship and are rescued by Monger and Insectosaurus, now metamorphosed into a butterfly. The ship explodes, killing Gallaxhar and his army.
Returning to Modesto, Ginormica, B.O.B., Dr. Cockroach, Link, and Insectosaurus receive praise from the people. Hoping to give himself a career boost, Derek tries to get back with Ginormica, but she rejects and humiliates him live on TV with B.O.B. swallowing Derek up and spitting him out. 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 monsters head out to confront the new threat.
In a mid-credits scene, Hathaway, pleased with Monger's work for helping the monsters save the world from Gallaxhar, promotes him to the President's senior security staff/chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff as his reward (which is also his gift to him for his 90th birthday), but Hathaway's attempt to celebrate with coffee ends with him pressing the opposite button, causing their country's nuclear arsenals to launch. Realizing what he did, he then asks if anyone in the audience wants to freeze his head.
Voice cast
Reese Witherspoon as Susan Murphy/Ginormica, a young woman from Modesto, California who gets hit by a radioactive meteorite on her wedding day, causing her to change drastically and grow into a 50 foot, 10 inch (15.49m) tall giantess. Her exposure to the quantonium also makes her hair change from brown to white and gives her super-strength and physical imperviousness. Seth Rogen as B.O.B. (Benzoate Ostylezene Bicarbonate), an indestructible blue 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. Hugh Laurie as Dr. 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, 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. 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 one-eyed robotic alien clone probes, and 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. Amy Poehler as Gallaxhar's computer. 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 both his youthful appearance and arrogant personality. Stephen Colbert as President Eugene 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 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. John Krasinski as Cuthbert, Katie's boyfriend. Ed Helms as the News Reporter. David James Koch provided the voice for the character for the Australian release of the film.
Production The film started as an adaptation of a horror comic book, Rex Havoc, in which a monster hunter Rex and his team of experts called "Ass-Kickers of the Fantastic" fight against ghouls, ghosts and other creatures. The earliest development goes back to 2002, when DreamWorks first filed for a Rex Havoc trademark. 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. 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.
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. 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. 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." 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."Modern Movie Monster-Making", Monsters vs. Aliens DVD
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 6TB for an explosion scene.
Starting with Monsters vs. Aliens, all feature films released by DreamWorks Animation were produced in a stereoscopic 3D format, using Intel's InTru3D technology. 2D, RealD 3D, IMAX 3D, and 4DX versions were released.
Soundtrack