Review: 'Love and Monsters' is a post-apocalyptic YA tale with action, humor, and a solid performance by Dylan O'Brien

Young-adult romance meets post-apocalyptic action in “Love and Monsters,” a movie that isn’t nearly as boring as that title.

In the near future, an asteroid is hurtling towards Earth. Humanity figures out how to shoot rockets to destroy the asteroid, but fails to reckon with the chemical fallout from the rockets, which turn all cold-blooded creatures into mutated monsters — which then eat 95% of all humans on Earth.

We’re told all this, in sardonic college-kid fashion, by Joel Dawson (played by “The Maze Runner” star Dylan O’Brien), the least battle-ready member of a survivors’ colony in what used to be called California. Joel can’t hunt, freezing up when he needs to shoot his crossbow, but he makes a great minestrone and handles the radio — through which he finds Aimee (Jessica Henwick, formerly of Marvel’s “Iron Fist”), his high-school girlfriend seven years ago, before the mutants attacked.

Joel, feeling alone in a colony filled with couples, decides to risk death by trekking 85 miles to the coastal colony where Aimee lives. His friends in his colony don’t expect him to survive, and at first they would seem to be right, as Joel barely escapes the darting tongue of a giant toad and a few other creatures. Joel gets some help from two veteran surface dweller, old Clyde (Michael Rooker) and 8-year-old Minnow (Ariana Greenblatt), whose advice helps Joel make it to Aimee’s colony — where things don’t go as he hoped.

The screenplay, by Brian Duffield (who directed the recent YA horror comedy “Spontaneous”) and Matthew Robinson (“The Invention of Lying”), propels Joel from one harrowing adventure to the next, with a healthy dose of sarcastic humor. Director Michael Matthews, on his second feature (after a little-known Western from South Africa, “five Fingers for Marseilles”), balances the scares and jokes with some impressive visual effects and a consistent tone that suggests the end of the world isn’t worth losing one’s snarky attitude.

O’Brien is the key to “Love and Monsters,” since the story makes the audience his travel companions for the whole journey. Thankfully, O’Brien is an easygoing charmer, handsome without being too showy about it, who gives Joel a pleasantly self-deprecating side. He makes “Love and Monsters” worth the walk. 

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‘Love and Monsters’

★★★

Opens Friday, October 16, at theaters where open. Rated PG-13 for action/violence, language and some suggestive material. Running time: 109 minutes.