Monsters - loads of long pause pseudo art house filler crap, and not much else. I'm all for low budget independent creature features, but talk about removing the fun from a great premise and giving us a dreary low key chick flick instead. The cheap bastards.
You know, even though I really like the other films you mentioned (except for
Requiem for a Dream), I can understand the points you made about them and I recognize that they're not perfect, nor are they for everyone.
But with
Monsters, I feel like this was a misconception that most people had with the film. People expected monsters, not an Indie love story. That's largely the fault of the studio, which marketed it as a big-budget creature feature, a la
Cloverfield, but that was never Gareth Edwards' intention... nor should it have been.
I rather like that it does what it does on such a meager budget (which
was the intent) and uses the monster backdrop to tell a different kind of story: one that's written and acted beautifully. It proves that a great film doesn't need an orgy of money and explosions... that it's really all about the characters because that's where we connect. You just have to be in that mindset, I think, and really like this kind of Indie filmmaking.