Bracelet of Bones, by Kevin Crossley-Holland

Kevin Crossley-Holland is one of the giants of children's fiction, which he's been writing for as long as I can recall - I remember being thrilled by his version of Beowulf when I was at school.  More recently his Arthur trilogy has been hugely and deservedly successful, and its lovely pendant, Gatty's Tale is one of my favourite modern novels.  He's also, among other things, an acclaimed poet, and the author of the marvellous Penguin Book of Norse Myths.  

His latest book, Bracelet of Bones, marks a return to the Viking north.  Rather as his Arthur books drew on Arthurian traditions from all across Europe, Bracelet of Bones reminds us that the Vikings didn't just operate in northern seas but sailed and traded as far as Byzantium (Constantinople to us; Miklagard to them).  And like Gatty's Tale, the new book is the story of a girl on a journey; Solveig, who sets out to follow her father, a Viking warrior who has gone to join the Byzantine emperor's Varangian guard.


Solveig's odyssey takes her from 11th Century Norway through the heart of what is now Russia, to Novgorod, Kiev, and the perilous cataracts of the River Dnieper.  Along the way she encounters kings and craftsman, Christians and pagans, shamans and slaves.  There is an ambush by savage Pechenegs (me neither), a meeting with an English spy, and landfall at last in Byzantium itself, a city so teeming with life and detail that it leaves you longing to know more, and looking forward to the sequel (which is already under way, hoorah!).  Most of the people Solveig meets are basically good, and few of the bad ones seem completely bad; there is a refreshing absence of real villainy; a sense that people (except maybe Pechenegs) are basically decent.


This is not a fast-moving story.  It flows like a river, mostly slow and patient, taking its time, occasionally rushing over sudden rapids of violence and tragedy.  I wonder how it will be received by young readers used to the breakneck pacing of many contemporary children's books?  I hope they give it a chance, and bring to it the concentration which it demands and deserves.  They will be rewarded if they do.  It's a rich and convincing evocation of the past, and at the same time a great character study - a tremendous amount of the book takes place in Solveig's head, as her thoughts and memories constantly interweave with the narrative, as do the stories that she knows; the myths and superstitions which often seem as real to her as the rest of her world.  It's a book about fathers and daughters, and friendship, and the joys and difficulties of making things: carvings; stories.  It's about growing up.  


And perhaps more than any of these, it's about language and the love of language: like my other favourite writer, Geraldine McCaughrean, Mr Crossley-Holland is an author whose books need reading at least twice; once for the story, and once for the words themselves.


Philip Reeve

A Good Workout

By Andrew Gorton

In the summer of 2010, a friend, knowing of my burgeoning interest in nature and the environment, handed me the July programme of a conservation group that had, at that time, been going for nearly a year. Activities included earthworm surveys, tree planting, and the removal of bracken, bramble and other invasive species, among similar endeavours. The group was called the North Norfolk Workout Project. 

Keen to try it out, I turned up at Cromer train station, one of the pick-up points mentioned on the programme, and duly the project minibus arrived, driven by project manager Mark. After introductions, Mark explained a bit more about the group. The project had been set up by the North Norfolk district Council and BTCV, with input from English Nature and the NHS, amongst other groups. The idea was to undertake outdoor conservation projects in the North Norfolk region, and in the process give volunteers access to nature and improve their physical and mental health.

So off we went to Sadlers Wood near North Walsham - myself, Mark and a half-dozen or so other volunteers, to clear bracken from a wild flower meadow. I must admit, when I saw the amount of bracken, I quailed a bit, and wondered if we could clear it all. But we all got stuck in, and soon large swathes of the stuff had been cleared. I found it surprising and strangely satisfying to see the amount we had done just  a couple of hours.

 After a very pleasant tea break – an essential fixture of each session - some of the group carried out a couple of surveys on behalf of the Open Air Laboratories Network (OPAL), a scheme run by the Natural History Museum that encourages people to investigate certain aspects of the natural world and report their results. That day, we carried out a soil and earthworm survey. This involved  investigating a patch of soil to find out its make-up, (how much sand, how much clay etc.), its acidity, and whether there were any earthworms nearby. The next survey involved checking trees for specific types of lichen to determine the levels of nitrogen in the air - some lichens thrive in nitrogen rich air and others do not, so this is a good way of checking air quality. In the event, we found neither earthworms nor lichens of any kind, but the results were sent off, and hopefully the boffins at the NHM can make something of them. I returned home at the end of the day having enjoyed both the work and the surroundings a lot. 

It was after this that a period of ill health prevented me from getting about for a bit, so I was unable to attend any more sessions until September, when I became involved in earnest. I attended a wildlife walk in Bacton woods with Mark's colleague Fin, and saw an unbelievable (to me, at any rate) array of different fungi – 2010 being a bumper year for them. The session after that at Holt Country Park was something of a knees-up to celebrate the Project's 1^st anniversary. A good time was had by all, although I did feel a bit guilty attending the event – I had only done 2 sessions prior to this, and I was rubbing shoulders with people who had done 30, 40, or 50 sessions....   Anyway, I got a good vibe from all the other volunteers, they were proud of what they had done in the last year, and Mark and Fin were given cards signed by everybody in appreciation of their efforts.

Since then, I have worked at a number of sites throughout North Norfolk with the Project, performing a lot of different conservation activities.

At Pigneys Wood at North Walsham, one of the earliest tasks I was involved in was raking recently mown grass from a wild flower meadow. This is to prevent the grass from rotting down and swamping the soil – wild flowers prefer thin soil with relatively few nutrients; a case of 'less is more.'  On subsequent sessions there I have found myself cutting reeds, planting hedges and trees and coppicing alders. Coppicing is an ancient form of woodland management, where the trees are cut right down to the stumps, and then allowed to grow, often producing several thin poles from the same stump. In the meantime, the reduced canopy allows more light to reach the forest floor, increasing biodiversity there.  On this particular exercise, these alders had been previously coppiced, and the numerous poles we sawed down were going to be used for an art project. They are flexible enough to be weaved, or 'wattled' into walls. (A more recent coppicing session at Holt Country Park will see the alder trunks used to make a maze – pretty 'amazing' eh?). Incidentally, a similar technique is pollarding. This is where the trees are cut to chest or head height. This is to allow livestock to graze without damaging the new shoots.

A regular activity we carry out around Holt and Sheringham is the removal of rhododendrons, an extremely invasive species. Although it sometimes seems a never-ending task – there are masses of this plant around - 5 or 6 of us can make short work of a large rhodo bush. Indeed, it is quite satisfying to saw through a large trunk of this Triffid-like plant and remove great swathes of it for later burning.

A couple of sessions were at Salthouse Heath, clearing gorse, not only to encourage biodiversity, but to expose 4000-year-old Bronze Age burial mounds for archaeological investigation. One cannot choose but wonder what sort of people they were, or what life was like back then. The photographs below show one particular mound,  before we had begun work, and after we had finished for the afternoon.

Before:

After: 

There was one particular session at Salthouse I shall never forget. We'd finished early to go and see the nearby remains of a World War 2 radar mast. Towards the end of the war, a Lancaster bomber returning from a mission over Germany had to divert from it's home airfield due to thick fog that had covered the whole area. Lost, and flying at around 200 feet, the plane had crashed right into this radar mast. Six of the crew were killed outright, and the seventh died a few hours later. It was very sobering to see the remains of the tower – four concrete 'feet', each with about a meter or so of metal girder sprouting from them, adorned with wooden crucifixes and a poppy wreath. There was a light fog forming when we got there, and knowing what had happened there, it was quite an eerie experience.

On a lighter note, and speaking of fog, I have, perhaps a touch masochistically, gone out in all weathers during my time with the project. Sun, rain, snow; you name it I've been out in it. Holt Country Park, just before Christmas, looked particularly winter-wonderlandy:

The project has also garnered a couple of prestigious awards. One, awarded before I had joined, was for encouraging biodiversity in the region. We were also one of three groups short-listed for the Love Norfolk category for the Norfolk People of the Year awards. I was privileged to be invited, along with fellow volunteer Clive along to the evening by Mark and Fin (we had to wear suits, a real shock to the system!) along with representatives from other organisations involved with the NNWP. In the end, we lost to a community composting group based in Trunch. (Boo! Hiss!) But all in all, it was an honour to be short-listed, and it was a great evening, with some good food and some really inspiring stories of human endeavour. We also managed to filch a few bottles of wine to boot-something extra for Christmas!

So far, I have done some 40 sessions with the North Norfolk Workout Group, and have enjoyed them immensely. I have particularly enjoyed meeting and working with the other volunteers, who are from a variety of backgrounds. Some are college students studying the countryside and the environment. A couple of others already have degrees in similar fields. All have brought their knowledge to the Project in one way or another. Some, like me, are unemployed and are seeking to gain new skills and experience. Still others have come on the Project to meet new people and to just get out of the house and do something worthwhile. But whatever the reasons, I think I can say that we have all got something out of the North Norfolk Workout.

Andrew Gorton is an Open University student, London born but now living on the North Norfolk coast.

MicMacs

Philip Reeve has been watching MicMacs (Jean-Pierre Jeunet, 2009. Cert. 12)

Films slip past me sometimes now that I live so far from cinemas.  How did I miss Mic-Macs?  Did it get no cinema release in the UK?  Was there no publicity?  Not to worry; it's on DVD now, and it's well worth watching.  

Alien: Resurrection

 Jean-Pierre Jeunet has been one of my heroes ever since his debut, Delicatessen, which he wrote and directed with Marc Caro back in 1991.  Their follow-up, City of Lost Children, was harder to like - beautiful but slightly unappealing - and then M Jeunet went off sans Caro to Hollywood to direct Alien: Resurrection which was legendarily, franchise-stallingly bad (although I suspect the fault lay more with the producers than the director, and there were still some lovely visual flourishes - Brad Dourif in his tailored lab-coat is the forefather of all the Engineers in Mortal Engines).  After that, thankfully, there were no more stints helming clapped-out Hollywood cash-cows; instead, M Jeunet returned to France to make Amelie (which, despite frequently being described as 'charming and quirky' actually is charming and quirky) and the magnificent World War 1 story A Very Long Engagement.  

A Very Long Engagement

And now, with very little fanfare as far I can tell, there is MicMacs, which combines some of the quirky sweetness of Amelie with a crazy bande dessine storyline which harks right back to Delicatessen.  The hero, Bazil, is a man who falls on hard times, and is rescued by a mis-matched 'family' of homeless oddballs who inhabit a glorious labyrinth of junk and salvage under a Parisian flyover. (I presume these are the MicMacs of the title, though I still have no idea what a MicMac actually is)  With their help he sets out to wreak revenge on the two arms manufacturers who have wrecked his life (one made the land-mine which killed his father, while the other produced the bullet which is lodged in Bazil's brain).  Through a series of increasingly complex ruses involving strange, scrap-heap machines, they start to turn the two armaments giants against one another...

It's all hugely unlikely, but likeliness is not the point here.  Jeunet films are fantasies, and even when they are set in present-day Paris he transforms it into a dream world.  His arms tycoons don't work out of soaring glass office buildings, but in a pair of identical 1930s towers which face each other across a narrow street.  The rooftops of Paris can't really be such a fantastic maze of smoking chimney-pots any more, can they?  The film's scrap-metal saboteurs perform feats out of Mission Impossible with equipment which could have been designed by the Wombles.  Even when he photographs something mundane, like people uploading videos to YouTube or stuck in a traffic jam among modern buildings, Jeunet gives it all a strange patina of age and difference.  Under the eye of his restless, gliding camera Paris transforms itself into a parallel world, much like the retro-future of Delicatessen (which was itself a nod to the retro-future of Terry Gilliam's Brazil).

Like all my favourite film-makers, Jeunet doesn't seem that interested in dialogue.  You sense he would have been perfectly at home in the silent era.  In the pre-title sequence he explains Bazil's background perfectly in a few swift and largely wordless scenes.  Later, at taxi-ranks and on roof-tops, there are visual routines worthy of Chaplin.  It's tempting to compare it to French comic-books, but that would be misleading, because while every shot is composed as beautifully as a Moebius strip, Mic-Macs isn't like a comic book: it's like a movie. It's also very sweet - a revengers' comedy in which good triumphs, romance blossoms, and villains are ingeniously undone.

As they say on French YouTube (apparently): Partager Cette Video.

Is the Turner Prize a Reflection of Art Today?

Back when the Bee was young I had a bit of a strop about the Tate Gallery (or 'Tate Britain' as it's been rebranded).  This prompted Ethan Wilderspin to send in  the following piece on the Tate, the Turner Prize, and, y'know, Art...

Is there any question that Claude Monet’s Impression Sunrise is art? (Whether you like the painting or not is a different matter.)  

Is Tracy Emin’s My Bed art? Does anyone like it?

Impression Sunrise (Claude Monet Prints)

My Bed (Saatchi Gallery)

 The Turner Prize is either a prestigious award for contemporary art in the UK for artists under 50, or it is “Crap” – a pretentious award given to talentless individuals who are self proclaimed ‘artists’. Why is there so much controversy and disagreement over the Turner Prize? Is it because some people fail to grasp modern conceptual art, or is it because some people wake up in a bed not all that unlike Miss Emin’s every day? Indeed, does raw artistic talent lie within the rooms of all adolescent boys on the mornings that their mothers forget to scold them for their untidiness? 

The Turner prize emerged the 1980’s and has had more media attention since its beginnings than any other award for artists in Britain. It is named, perhaps some what ironically, after the 19^th Century English landscape painter J. M. W. Turner. The prize (awarded in the Tate Britain gallery), although having been given to painters on occasion, is heavily criticized for generally focusing on conceptual or installation art. This is undeniably the case but why do these art mediums cause so much controversy around the event?

2008 Turner Prize winner Mark Leckey, talking of the controversy surrounding the prize, said, ‘I don’t care about all this.  I want to make work that has some kind of effect on people, and basically…  this show got called effectless, it had no impact and is attenuated. But I don’t get that.’ Disregarding Leckey’s personal opinion, he summarises the outlook of many in relation to the Turner Prize.

The Stuckists are a group of people who demonstrate on the doorstep of the Turner Prize every time it’s held. They claim to be “Anti the pretensions of conceptual art”, which according to them is the same as being Anti Anti-art. Essentially this shows that whether the Turner Prize is a good indication of contemporary British art or not, comes down to whether or not the individual considers a lot of the conceptual, video and instillation pieces actual art or not.

This seems to be the case, as everyone seems to want to put in their two penny’s worth. Kim Howells wrote "If this is the best British artists can produce then British art is lost.” Janet Street-Porter said “The Turner Prize entices thousands of young people into art galleries for the first time every year. It fulfils a valuable role”. There is so much criticism that comes from every angle, positive and negative. But the problem with the Turner prize is that this seems to be its very purpose; media hype. It is a showcase of controversy and that is all it ever has been, a magnet for media attention. Every year people wait to see how bizarre, mundane or talentless the new contestants' work will be; never do they expect (or, so it seems receive) ‘Art’ but instead media hype about some stupid soulless award.

John Bourne, curator of the Tate museum said "We are grateful for the extra publicity the Stuckists have given the Tate". This seemingly witty comment actually just seems to confirm the notion that the Turner Prize is nothing more than a mainstream advertisement which uses the media for its marketing. Is that art?

Ethan Wilderspin describes himself as 'A nineteen year old unemployed layabout with vague comic book author/illustrator aspirations...'

Firefly & Serenity

By Philip Reeve



"This is the captain. We have a little problem with our engine sequence, so we may experience some slight turbulence, and then explode."

When I started writing about Stuff I Like on the internet one of the first things on my 'To Do' list was Firefly.  Then I looked around and couldn't help noticing that the internet is pretty much made of Firefly: references to it, and sites about it, seem to be everywhere; surely everyone must know about it already, and wouldn't be the least bit interested in hearing what I had to say on the subject.


But lately I've encountered a surprising number of people who haven't seen it, and even some who, when you mention it, go "What's Firefly?"  So here's The Solitary Bee's guide to its fellow insect-named cultural phenemenon.


Firefly (Cert 12) is a 2002 sci-fi TV series created by Joss Whedon, probably best known for the wonderful Buffy the Vampire Slayer and its sometimes wonderful spin-off Angel (a show which didn't so much jump the shark as vault nimbly to and fro across the shark in the manner popularised by Cretan bull dancers).  When I first heard that Mr Whedon's new show would be a 'space western' I was unimpressed - aren't all space operas basically westerns?  But Firefly takes its conceit to the (il)logical extreme, dressing its space frontierspeople in braces, duster coats and fishtail trousers and arming them with souped-up six-shooters.  There are cows.  There are banjos.  There is a cowboy ballad theme song which mournfully celebrates the ultimate freedom of the final frontier - "You can't take the sky from me..."





Sadly it turned out that the powers that be at Fox TV actually could take the sky from us, and they proceeded to do so by canceling Firefly after 14 episodes, blaming poor viewing figures* (Boo!).  It then went on to become such a cult success on DVD that Joss Whedon was able to make a feature film, Serenity (Cert 15), which continues the story (Hurrah!).  Alas Serenity didn't do well enough at the box office to spawn a sequel (Boo again!)**.  Since then there have been several comics set in the Firefly universe (which I've not read), but all that the show's admirers are really left with is the movie and those original fourteen episodes.


Luckily, they were fourteen pretty good episodes.


Set 500 years in the future, Firefly takes place in a far-off solar system which has been settled by human colonists.  There are no monsters or aliens here (although the savage 'Reavers' who inhabit the system's fringes might as well be monsters, having lost all traces of humanity beyond an ability to maintain and fly ramshackle spacecraft ). These are far more down-to-earth alien worlds than we're used to visiting in the likes of Star Trek.  The frontier spirit prevails, and the production design is a witty mix of hi-tech and old west (the Serenity is surely the only film or TV spaceship that has wooden furniture in its mess hall).  The various planets have recently been unified following a civil war between the vaguely authoritarian Alliance and the freedom-lovin' Browncoats.  (The Browncoats, needless to say, got stomped on.)

Our hero, Mal Reynolds, is a former Browncoat who now captains the grimy old 'Firefly' class space freighter Serenity, running cargo and contraband and generally trying to keep one step ahead of the law.  As well as her small crew the Serenity carries some paying passengers; Book, a travelling preacher; space courtesan Inara***; and posh young doctor Simon Tam, who's on the run with his sister River (he has sprung her, as you do, from a top secret Alliance facility where attempts to turn her into a weapons-grade superhuman have left her talking in Whedonesque non sequiturs like Drusilla the Mockney Vampire).  Over the course of the truncated series we learn more about the characters' histories while they stage a couple of robberies, get involved in duels and tangle with space gangsters.  River is pursued by some scary, blue-gloved Alliance operatives, and That Christina Hendricks Off Madmen turns up as Mal's ex-wife.

All of which probably sounds a bit yawn if you haven't seen it,  because, like Buffy before it and Dollhouse after, Firefly is built entirely out of genre cliches.  What brings it alive, and lifts it above the competition, is hard to define.


 First there's the feel of it - the folksy music, the costumes that look as if there must be a branch of Old Town on most of these moons and planets, and the wobbly, uncertain 'hand-held' camerawork which takes the CGI sheen off the effects shots.


The backstory is slightly more subtle than I've made it sound, too.  The Alliance isn't exactly an evil empire (though some of its black ops have obviously crossed the line); it stands for order, security, and all the benefits of urban civilization; it's basically the sort of society that the heroes of shows like Star Trek belong to.   Mal and his comrades would probably be safer and cleaner and more prosperous living under its aegis, swapping the rusty earth-tones of the Serenity and all those backwater moons for the gleaming greys and whites of the Alliance worlds... but they wouldn't be free, and like many a good western, Firefly holds that freedom, with all its dangers and dilemmas, is more important than just about anything.


Then there's the language, packed with snappy one-liners and Whedon-y little asides, Deadwood-ish 19th Century-isms, space-slang (anything nice or good is "shiny") and scraps of Chinese (everyone in the 'verse swears in Chinese, although oddly enough nobody actually appears to be Chinese...).  When sci-fi cliches do appear, they're quickly undercut ("That sounds like something out of science fiction!" scoffs pilot Wash at some unlikely plot twist.  "We live on a spaceship, dear," his wife reminds him.)  Whedon's characters talk like no one else on telly: they falter; they make up words as they go along: they wander out into long convoluted sentences and can't work out how to get back; wobbly metaphors collapse beneath them, and rhetoric backfires.  It's hard to imagine a tense eve-of-battle argument in any other sci-fi thriller featuring an angry exchange like this one between Mal and his uppity crewman Jayne in Serenity:

Mal: (Rhetorically) "You wanna run this ship?!"

Jayne: "Yes!"

Mal: (Completely flummoxed) "Well... you can't!"

And most of all there are the characters themselves.  When I watched the pilot show I found it hard  to warm to Nathan Fillion as Mal: he just seemed tough, brooding, and bitter.  I assumed he was the 26th century's version of Clint Eastwood's Josey Wales; a burned out case who would slowly recover his humanity.  But as the series progressed it soon turned out that Mal was already far more human than your average sci-fi space captain; as well as the bitter and brooding thing he can be clumsy, funny, stubborn, shy, heroic - and sometimes just plain wrong.  It's a lovely, self-deprecating performance (and David Boreanaz as Angel managed something similar, so I suspect much of the credit must go to Joss Whedon's writing****).

Alan Tudyk as Serenity's pilot is equally endearing, playing one of Whedon's familiar uber-nerds, wistfully aware that he's not as tough and battle-hardened as his wife Zoe or crewmates Mal and Jayne.  ( "Hey, I've been in a firefight before! Well, I was in a fire...  Actually, I was fired...")  Zoe (Gina Torres) tends to act as Mal's conscience, she exudes strength and decency and we wish she had more time on screen.  Adam Baldwin's Jayne is a stupid, treacherous, bullying, loose cannon, but somehow quite loveable too, and the source of many of the show's best jokes (and best hat).   There's really no point listing the others, because they're all just as good (well Simon and River are a bit irritating, but I think they're meant to be) and the relationships between them, their rivalries and loyalties, smouldering resentments and undeclared loves, form the heart of Firefly.  That's what makes the series ultimately more enjoyable than the movie: Serenity packs a lot of plot into its two hours (and starts with the most elegant series of nested flashbacks I've ever seen to bring newcomers up to speed), but while it wraps up the story pretty well it hasn't time to explore the characters in the way that TV can.  If only they'd been allowed to develop over the course of three or four seasons...


Still, at least we have one series.  Well, two thirds of one series.  And a movie.  And a legion of loyal followers, who call themselves 'Browncoats', and whose cheerful devotion helps to keep the Firefly flame burning.  Whether it will last remains to be seen: a few years ago there seemed to be an idea around that if the fans were just vocal enough the show might be revived, but that seems unlikely now.  Maybe the story will continue in the comics.  Maybe Mr Whedon should commission, say, a little-known British children's sci-fi author to write some tie in novels.  Anyway, whatever happens, if you haven't joined the ranks of the Browncoats yet, you should buy, borrow, rent or download Firefly and Serenity (in that order).


They're shiny.

*Sci-fi shows have always suffered from being a)quite pricey to make and b)a bit of a minority interest - though weirdly the bleak War on Terror metaphor Battlestar Galactica which started around the same time as Firefly was popular enough to run to five joyless and increasingly confusing seasons...


**When Sarah and I went to see Serenity at the old Odeon in Plymouth there was a little speech by Joss Whedon tacked on to the beginning in which he thanked all the show's fans for making the movie possible.  It was thoroughly charming, and it felt as if he was talking just to us.  In fact, since we were the only people in the cinema, I guess technically he was....


***Joss Whedon seems to have something of a preoccupation with the Oldest Profession*.  It surfaces again in the much darker Dollhouse.  I expect feminists have something to say about that.


****Of course it takes quite a large team of writers to produce the scripts for a show like Firefly, and some of the dialogue I've quoted in this post may not be by Joss Whedon himself; but I'm assuming he's responsible for the creation of the character's characters.


*That's stonemasons, children.

Excalibur Pre-Fabs

It turns out that Excalibur isn't just the name of King Arthur's sword, and my favourite movie; it's also an estate of 1940s pre-fab bungalows in South London, which Lewisham Council (Boo!  Hiss!) is currently planning to demolish.  This short video was made by Sarah McIntyre, who has written about it on her own highly esteemed blog.  It's a great introduction to a place - and a cause - that I did not know about.  I particularly like the way that all the streets on the estate seem to be named after Arthurian characters...  though who'd want to live on  Morded Road?

Monsters

By Philip Reeve

Living in the country: being a parent: going to the cinema.  It's possible to combine any two of these activities but not, I've found, all three.  Since my son was born in 2002 I've barely been to the pictures at all, except to take him to see the occasional Pixar movie.  But last night he was staying with one of his friends, so Sarah and I ventured down to the Barn cinema at Dartington to watch Monsters, an ambitious low-budget sci-fi road movie by the young British director Gareth Edwards.  (In my day, young British directors only did cheesy mockney gangster flicks, so whatever you think of his film you have to admit that ambitious sci-fi road movies are a step in the right direction.)

Monsters is cut from similar (but cheaper) cloth to Neil Bloemenkamp's District 9.  It follows a couple of stranded Americans as they try to make it back to the US border through a spreading 'infected zone' in northern Mexico which has been seeded with alien life brought back by a ill-advised NASA space probe (did Quatermass teach them nothing?)  Unlike your average Hollywood catastophe flick, Monsters doesn't show us the end of civilisation happening overnight, but presents it as something slow and rather humdrum.  Unfortunately the film itself is also slow and humdrum in places, with the central characters flanning around picturesque Mexican barrios like hipsters on a gap-year, barely bothering to mention the giant space octopi which are such a fixture on the rolling news channels.  The aliens - whose motives and intelligence remain obscure - seem to have been infected by the same ennui and just stomp listlessly about knocking down buildings and scoffing pick-up tricks because, you know, that's what monsters do...  It's obviously aiming to be a bit more existential than your average creature feature, but I did find myself yearning for the days when monster movies always came complete with a Scientist and his Beautiful Daughter who could explain a bit about the critters' life cycles.

Still, mustn't grumble; the film is beautifully shot and edited, and the background is nicely sketched in, with hovering gunships and flights of jets giving the impression of some huge, secret and probably doomed military operation going on just beyond the edges of the story, and signs everywhere which look like the Mexican equivalent of those wartime 'Keep Calm and Carry On' posters that trendhounds nowadays find so hugely ironic.   There are a couple of very well done monster encounters, and slightly too many scenes which build up a huge amount of tension and then fizzle out in some sort of false alarm.  There is also a very good journey up a river clearly twinned with one in Apocalypse Now.

In the old days, monsters were always a metaphor for The Bomb; these modern ones were definitely a metaphor for something, but I couldn't quite work out what.  The gringos' carpet bombing and chemical weapons seemed to be causing more damage than the creatures themselves, and a lot was made of a huge anti-alien wall which the US authorities were building all along their southern border.  There was a bit of talk about how the U.S was 'imprisoning itself'.  I suspect the message we were supposed to come away with was that the Third World, despite all its poverty, violence, and scary viruses, is actually no more of a threat to us than a swarm of aggressive walking squid the size of office buildings.  Or something.