7. Annoying, Unlikable Characters
Word of advice for any aspiring filmmakers: If you're going to make a film that will focus entirely on two characters from beginning to end, make sure those characters are at least mildly likable. The two protagonists of Monsters are so bland and uninteresting that they might as well be your average slasher film victim. On one hand we have Andrew Kaulder, a journalist whose apparently so bad at his work that he's requested to take back an annoying girl back to the US. A character like him should be an interesting one to develop in an environment like this, giving him a chance to experience what very few people have experienced in the world as well as to see a place where no one has made it through. However we end up with an extremely annoying character who not only doesn't take full advantage on being in a wonderful place, who only complains that nothing is happening (although if we take the audience into account he wouldn't be the only one) and one whose stupid enough to leave all his money and documents in the room of a cheap hotel. Basically he's a teenager. Then we have Samantha Wyden. Do I really need to say anything about her? The only way her character could be interesting is if the director made a clever turn with the "Princess in a tough world" thing, but he didn't. She spends most of the movie complaining about stupid things, doing "smart" things that didn't make sense for her character, and being nothing but a problem for the other protagonist, who was not the brightest person on the screen. Well, at least they had chemistry, right? While the actors did a relatively good work with the incredibly poor script they had, they had little to no chemistry, with the only moments in which it made sense their "friendship" was when they were complaining about the situation that they were. The romance was definitely the worst part of the movie, not even Nicholas Sparks could've made a more forced romance than this one.