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Writer-director Gareth Edwards says the budget was more than the figure often quoted in online gossip - a paltry $15,000 - but not much more.
Our heroes are photojournalist Kaulder and Sam, Kaulder's boss's daughter. We meet them in Mexico some time after a NASA probe has returned from Jupiter's moon Europa . The mission was an outstanding success in that it discovered extraterrestrial life , but a disastrous failure in that it crashed upon re-entry and scattered alien spores over Central America. These then grew into giant roving cephalopod-like organisms, and colonised a large swathe of Mexico. This region has been declared a no-go infected zone.
But that was six years ago. No longer headline news, the alien presence on Earth has receded into the background and is "just one of those things". It's like, says Edwards, if Godzilla is the 9/11 of alien movies - a devastating shock invasion coming out of nowhere - he wanted to make the Afghanistan war of alien movies, something that the public has got used to. With the aliens on their doorstep, however, the US government is taking extreme and destructive action to try and secure its border.
Against this backdrop, Sam and Kaulder (Whitney Able and Scoot McNairy) have to cross the infected zone in order to return to the US.
Filmed guerrilla-style in six weeks with a cast of two and a crew of six, making use of people they met in Mexico and often improvising dialogue, the film blurs the line between documentary and feature film.
CultureLab: Monsters – the most realistic alien movie ever?
Go watch the movie. I highly recommend it over skyline.