New 'toon has a brain but very little heart

Rating: 5/10 (30 March 2009)

One would have to believe that - as far as animated features goes - Dreamworks must feel sort of like Avis Car Rental, No. 2 behind Pixar Studios. This feeling of inferiority was never more apparent with the release of "Monsters vs. Aliens," which is basically "Monsters, Inc." meets the "Incredibles," two vastly superior Pixar movies.
A colorful wonderama for the kiddies with a few over-their-head jokes tossed in to please mom and pop, this picture exhibits a lot of intelligence, but strangely very little heart. This is surprising especially for the studio which produced the hilarious and often emotional "Shrek" franchise. It also gets a bit intense in some scenes and parents may find this a bit of a problem, as well.
Story has Susan (voice of Reese Witherspoon) preparing for her marriage to cocksure, selfish weatherman Derek Deil (Paul Rudd, "I Love You, Man") when she is struck by a meteor from out of the blue. Of course, as we all know, such an occurrence would not crush her, it just makes her grow to gigantic proportions - 49 and-a-half feet, to be exact.
Soon, the government arrives, stuns, captures and hauls her off to a gray jail cell (here is where my children and many others in the theater had their initial glee interrupted, as the scene is quite dreary and depressing). Soon, though, she perks up when meeting her fellow cell mates, various monsters kept in captivity since the 1950s: Dr. Cockroach (a play on the Fly, voiced by Hugh "House" Laurie); the Missing Link (a Creature from the Black Lagoon,); B.O.B. (a one-eyed Blob-type thing, Seth Rogen, Observe and Report") and a giant caterpillar (think Mothra). This last mutant is really creepy and exhibits no cuddle or humor factor, whatsoever.
General W. R. Monger ("24's" Keifer Sutherland) informs Susan (now called "Gi ) that she will have to be incarcerated here for life, now very promising news to a lady on her wedding day. But soon, as fate would dictate, an alien entity (a giant one-eyed steel robot) has landed on earth in search of a substance that was in the meteor that stuck Susan. When the President (Stephen Colbert, "The Colbert Report") tries to communicate - via a series of wisecracks - the intruder goes berserk, and even the Army cannot stop it.
These scenes, as well as the war room sequences, are very funny, but are far above the average child's ability to grasp. Seeing no other choice, Monger tells the President that only the captive monsters can save the day. They are subsequently released and tackle the giant robotic device. Later, they are forced to face the angry alien leader (Rainn Wilson, "The Office") aboard his mothership.
As previously written, the animation here is terrific. The scenes in and around San Francisco are amazing; the views from space awesome and the characters well done and well-defined. The writing, for the most part, tries to imitate the old Warner Brothers cartoons with juvenile silliness the youngsters could relate to mixed in with the jokes only adults could contemplate.
The main problems are the lack of character development (we know little of any of the main leads and the various aliens and monsters are just thrown at us); poor pacing (the movie speeds up slows down and speeds up again) and the absence of an emotional center (we just do not care about any of these characters like we did Shrek or Fionna or Donkey, for that matter). The faults are not fatal, but do draw the distinction between better, more polished animated CGI efforts.
Still, in an atmosphere of really bad films currently playing, and fewer family movies showing, "Monsters vs. Aliens" is not a terrible picture to see; at least the whole family can be entertained for a while and there's nothing wrong with that.