#671 – Monster Trucks (2016)

Monster Trucks (2016)

Film review #671

Director: Chris Wedge

SYNOPSIS: A young junkyard worker gets a surprise when a strange tentacled creature wanders into the yard to consume oil. He learns that a local oil company is after it after they disturbed its habitat, so the pair team up to rescue the other creatures that have been captured and get them home…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Monster Trucks is a 2016 sci-fi film. When oil company Terravax inadvertently drills into a oil reserve that houses intelligent creatures. Terravax manage to capture two of them, but one escapes to a junkyard where high school student Tripp is working. After befriending the creature, he realises that he can fit the creature in the front of his truck and essentially become an engine for it, and the two team up to try and keep it safe from Terravax security and find it’s way home. The story is very much an E.T. and Free Willy story, with nothing new to offer: the creature wants to find it’s way home, and the big mean oil company is standing in it’s way, these are not novel concepts. Full of clear-cut clichés that barely play out, it is easy to simply tune out of this film, but sticking with it, there is a certain charm the film exudes, and it pulls off it’s main premise decently. There’s not really much depth to it, but the pre-teen audience it is aimed at might be entertained enough by the sporadic amount of action.

The characters are again a fairly uninteresting bunch: reasonably likeable leads keep the film going, but side characters barely get any mileage out of their appearances. The creature itself is rendered nicely, and is fairly well animated and brought to life. Applying any amount of scrutiny to the plot very quickly unravels any cohesion or reason. For example, the sheer amount of damage Tripp does when he and the creature are on the road includes smashing into other people’s cars and crushing a whole row of them in front of a car dealership, but nowhere is it mentioned again, even by the Sherriff who is his Mum’s boyfriend. Despite doing hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of damage throughout the film, Tripp just ends the film with a brand new truck and goes on his way seemingly with no repercussions. Also, the blatant disregard to any actual physics with how cars handle is something you’re clearly supposed to overlook as well. Like I say, the film is for a young audience that aren’t going to perform any analysis on the consistency of the plot, but it does ask you to overlook a lot of things that don’t make sense.

Overall, Monster Trucks is just another kid’s movie that recycles the E.T. and Free Willy formula while contributing little to nothing of it’s own. Nevertheless, it does have enough charm and likability in some of it’s lead characters to get you through it if you’re not turned off. The consistencies of the plot bare very little relation to reality sometimes, but given the young target audience, that can be overlooked. It’s just not going to challenge that audience with anything impactful or long-lasting. Monster Trucks is best described as mild entertainment that’s stuck in first gear.