109 min | PG-13 | October 16, 2020 | Paramount Pictures
Giant monsters have inherited the Earth and Joel Dawson has spent seven years hiding from them in a bunker. Then he hears his old girlfriend’s voice on the radio and decides to walk eighty-five miles of killing ground to find her. Love makes you stupid, and stupid is how you meet a crab the size of a house.
Joel Dawson survives the apocalypse from a bunker. Cold-blooded creatures have mutated into giant monsters and wiped out most of humanity. Seven years underground have made Joel useful at nothing and afraid of everything. When he reconnects by radio with his old girlfriend Aimee, he decides to cross eighty-five miles of monster country to reach her. The film is a coming-of-age story wearing a creature-feature costume, and it knows exactly what it is.
Dylan O’Brien plays Joel as a competent coward, which is a specific and difficult register. He can fix a radio and identify a venomous bug. He freezes the moment teeth appear. O’Brien lets the panic read on his face without playing it for cheap laughs. Michael Rooker plays Clyde, a grizzled survivor who teaches Joel to aim low and trust his instincts, and Rooker underplays the mentor role instead of chewing it. Ariana Greenblatt holds her own as Minnow, a kid who has stopped being scared, and her flat practicality cuts against Joel’s flailing. Jessica Henwick gives Aimee enough weariness to suggest she has moved on while Joel has been frozen in place.
Michael Matthews directs from a script by Brian Duffield and Matthew Robinson, and the standout craft is the creature work. The monsters have weight and texture. A giant toad, a crab the size of a building, and a swarm of sand-burrowing things each get their own physics and their own way of hunting. The design grounds the fantasy by making the creatures feel like real animals scaled up rather than abstract threats. Matthews stages the attacks in daylight and open country, which trades horror-movie shadow for clarity and lets the effects do the work.
The film hits every beat of the road-trip structure on schedule, and the emotional stakes stay light. Joel learns to be brave. The dog survives. None of it surprises. What works is the execution. The creatures are convincing, O’Brien is easy to root for, and the movie moves with purpose toward a destination it never pretends to hide. It delivers a clean, well-built version of a familiar thing.