If you have to see "Monsters vs. Aliens" - and if you're a parent, you will have to - make sure it's the 3-D version. The film's opening scenes deposit the audience somewhere in the middle of the rings of Saturn with a parsecs-wide vastness that is out of this world. Every kid in the screening I attended blurted out a stunned "Whoa," and so did most of the grown-ups: We were witnessing not just the beginning of a film but the start of the next phase of blockbuster-movie technology, like it or not.
Monsters vs. Aliens
'Monsters' brawl: Creature feature face-off contrasts stunning 3-D visuals with flat script
The rest of "Monsters vs. Aliens," unfortunately, brings us slowly back to Earth. The latest computer-animated production from DreamWorks - home of "Shrek," "Madagascar," and "Kung Fu Panda" - is a perfectly acceptable family movie. The characters are cute even when they're ugly, and the script has the expected mixture of things going boom, gross-out slapstick for the kids, and arch pop-culture cross-referencing for Mom and Dad. My sixth-grade daughter and her little pal happily gave it a thumbs-up, and if that's all you need to know, go with God and Jeffrey Katzenberg.
If the movie's 3-D visuals are above-average, though, everything else just feels average, including the motley-crew story line that pits a heroine and her wacky friends against a silly villain. Susan Murphy (voiced by Reese Witherspoon) is a modest young woman in Modesto, Calif., who's about to be married to a vain twit of a TV weatherman (Paul Rudd). She's clocked by a falling meteorite outside the church and instantly transformed into a giantess, dubbed Ginormica by the US Army and spirited away to an underground facility somewhere in the desert. (Turn right at Area 51, I think.)
Her prison-mates represent a nifty cross section of 1950s movie monsters, names changed to protect the DreamWorks legal department. Dr. Cockroach (Hugh Laurie) is a lab-suited mad scientist with the head of a bug (i.e., The Fly); the Missing Link (Will Arnett) is an egotistical gill-man (The Creature From the Black Lagoon); Insectosaurus is a grub the size of the Chrysler building (Mothra crossed with Godzilla). Funniest of all - the best thing in the movie, really - is B.O.B., a cheerful protoplasmic Blob with a brain of Jell-O and the raspy slobbo voice of Seth Rogen.
Susan/Ginormica, of course, is the 50-Foot-Woman, not in attack-mode as in the 1958 movie but crippled by low self-esteem (since all modern family movies have to stop and smell the empowerment). She gets her groove back when a four-eyed alien named Gallaxhar (Rainn Wilson) sends his giant robot to Earth to seek out the rare element contained in the meteorite, which is now in her. Mayhem and the spectacular demise of the Golden Gate Bridge ensue.
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