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Minions and Monsters is a love letter to silent era cinema.
Minions and Monsters is unironically a modern-day kaiju classic (no, for real)
Minions and Monsters is the movie Martin Scorsese wanted to make with Hugo. Come to think of it, Minions and Monsters is the movie Damien Chazelle wanted to make with Babylon. It’s unironically one of the best movies EVER made about silent-era Hollywood and it’s almost guaranteed to be the only PG-rated kids movie to you’ll see this year featuring an honest to goodness decapitation scene.
It’s actually astonishing how subversive this movie is. It’s basically a covert allegory for the entire Despicable Me franchise, complete with the film’s actual director (Pierre Coffin) featured as a self-insert character named Max. This is TOTALLY a movie made for adults disguised as a goofy cartoon for elementary schoolers. With all of its references to Charlie Chaplin, Buster Keaton, The Battleship Potemkin, Citizen Kane and A Trip To The Moon, it’s an unabashed film nerd love-in that should fly right over the heads of anybody watching it under the age of 10 (or heck, even under the age of 30, for that matter.) Like, they even managed to sneak in the word “bastard” in one scene and you KNOW the filmmakers had to fight the studio like mad to keep it in there.
It’s obviously a movie made for literate audiences. I mean, the two main Minions are named Henry and James — do I even HAVE to make the connection for you? Furthermore, Minions and Monsters is a bit of a double-inverted parody of the Minions formula, with a meta narrative that pokes fun at commercialization, fan culture and the intrinsic hypocrisy of Hollywood as a whole. And on top of everything … it’s LITERALLY a Lovecraftian cosmic horror movie, complete with the world’s most adorable depiction of Cthulhu (voiced by Trey Parker of South Park fame, because why wouldn’t he?)
It’s actually a tripartite story here, with a wraparound story set in the modern day (no spoilers, but it DOES include a cameo from George Lucas.) The movie shucks the established Minions lore and indicates that a FEW Minions managed to avoid being stranded in Antarctica from 1812 until 1968 (a rather brilliant means of explaining how and why the Minions, who canonically seek out the most evil leader they can find, never joined the Confederacy or allied with Hitler.) Now set in the 1920s, one faction of Minions led by the aforementioned Henry and James look to use some good, old-fashioned sorcery to bring REAL monsters on sets for their kaiju flicks while another faction of Minions align themselves with the world’s first cosplayer … who is either a REAL robotic overlord hellbent on conquering the planet or just some dorky dude who still lives in a dingy apartment with somebody who may or may not be his on the downlow boyfriend. Or his dad. Or his brother. Or just some platonic flat mate. The movie leaves that part of the movie kinda’ vague, honestly.
Naturally, we don’t have to wait long until we get homages to Jaws, a subplot about the Minions unintentionally becoming women’s suffrage icons and gigantic alien behemoths who have a hard time transitioning from literal world destroyers to Hollywood A-listers. It’s a LOT of stuff for a barely 80-minute movie, but for the most part the filmmakers manage to get it all in there and, more incredibly, make all of it logical and unexpectedly riveting.
Granted, some elements of the film are weaker than others. There’s a burgeoning romance subplot that feels utterly superfluous and the movie kinda’ gives away its “twist” a tad too early. But you really can’t complain about the holistic package too much, especially when it culminates in a massive, Lovecraftian blob of eyeballs threatening to devour all of existence under the guise of a D.W. Griffith style epic. The apocalyptic grand finale is pretty much the best possible film adaptation of the old arcade game Rampage we could ever hope for, and just when you think you have this movie all figured out, it hits you with one final twist that I genuinely didn’t see coming.
It’s pretty easy to be jaded with modern day Hollywood productions. But Minions and Monsters is one of those joyous exceptions that proves the multi-billion-dollar conglomerates can still give us some entertaining and amusing bread and circuses when they put in a modicum amount of effort. I get the feeling Groucho Marx would’ve loved this movie — as would Hollywood Babylon writer Kenneth Anger.
Maybe it’s a bit much to describe this movie as Singing In the Rain for Gen Alpha. But there are a lot more commonalities between the two movies than you might want to believe. All I know is that I immensely enjoyed this movie — it’s pretty much everything Disclosure Day promised, only Minions and Monsters actually delivers it.
