At the end of Love and Monsters, Joel realizes the people he lived with in his bunker were his family all along and goes back to help them find a new home, inspiring other bunker dwellers to go out into the world in search of a better future. Love and Monsters is a 2020 movie directed by Michael Matthews from a screenplay by Brian Duffield and Matthew Robinson. Love and Monsters features performances from Dylan O’Brien, Jessica Henwick, Dan Ewing, Michael Rooker, and more.
After an astroid hits Earth and creates giant mutated versions of the planets flora and fauna, humanity is almost entirely wiped out and the survivors rally together in bunkers across the world. Joel Dawnson (Dylan O’Brien) is the odd duck of his bunker and doesn’t feel important because he’s not a good monsters hunter. Hoping to find his pre-apocalypse girlfriend, Aimee (Jessica Henwick), Joel sets out on an 85-mile quest across hostile terrain to find her. Along the way, Joel becomes a skilled adventurer and monster hunter, but after he gets to Aimee, he realizes his true family was always the people from the bunker he left behind.
All Clyde and Minnow’s Rules Explained
Every lesson Clyde and Minnow teach Joel.
The first people Joel meets upon his journey are Clyde (Michael Rooker) and Minnow (Ariana Greenblatt). They’re seasoned adventurers and monster hunters on their way to a remote bunker in the mountans where they say there’s fewer monsters. While Joel is inexperienced in the wild, it quickly becomes apparent Clyde and Minnow know what they’re doing, and they’ve even developed a whole list of rules to help them survive. Lesson 1 is simple: survey from high ground. If you get to a high point, make sure you check the terrain all around and below you to identify any trouble areas or spot any big or dangerous monsters.
Lesson 2 is the hardest for Joel to remember: at camp you can have a hot meal or sleep, but not both. This is because cooking can attract the monsters, so if you prepare food, you also need to leave shortly after without sleeping. Lesson 3 is a bit of old-fashioned wisdom: don’t take shortcuts. In unfamiliar areas with dangerous plants and animals, you want to keep to the trail so you don’t get caught in something you aren’t familiar with. After lesson 3, there’s a montage that skips a number of the lessons. Lesson 8 is to do target practice every day. Lesson 10 is to keep socks dry.
The final lesson Clyde leaves Joel with is “trust your instincts.” Joel is a novice monster hunter who readily admits he has terrible instincts, but Clyde explains that instincts are a product of experience, which depends on Joel taking some chances and hopefully having some luck and surviving. While he starts the movie freezing at the sight of monsters and unable to defend himself or others, by the end Joel has internalized all the lessons and added some of his own, recognizing which monsters are threats and how to defeat them, filling his book with this knowledge and passing it on to Aimee.
Why Didn’t Joel Stay With Aimee?
Wasn’t getting to her the whole point of his quest?
Joel crosses 85 miles of hostile terrain, battling dangerous mutants and poisonous plants to find Aimee, thinking things will be just like they were years ago when they were together, but almost immediately after he arrives it beccomes clear that things aren’t what he expected. First of all, while he’d spent years in the bunker pining after Aimee, she’d had another relationship to someone who had recently died, but second of all, Joel realized that his bond to the other people in his bunker was much tighter than he’d realized. The back of the map they gave him was covered in encouraging notes, reminding him he truly was a part of their community.
After arriving, Joel calls his bunker to let them know he’s ok, but when the radio drops out he becomes concerned for them and resolves to make the 85-mile trek back again to ensure they’re all ok, leaving Aimee behind. While the romance he expected with Aimee wasn’t immediately present, he left Aimee with a hopeful note, suggesting they could meet again in the future under different circumstances. For now, she has a bunker of seniors to care for, and he has his bunker to return and save. Maybe they’ll both end up in the mountains where Clyde and Minnow were headed one day.
Where Are Clyde and Minnow at the End?
Did they get all the way to the place they were going in the mountains?
Clyde and Minnow said there was a save haven in the mountains, and while the shot of them from the end of the movie suggests they found a settlement, it’s not entirely clear if it’s the refuge they anticipated. There aren’t any other humans visible, so are they the only ones there? Clearly there is a camp or settlement of some sort, but it’s entirely possible it’s abandoned. Additionally, while they said there are fewer dangerous monsters in the higher altitudes and colder climates, they question whether or not Joel can find them without being killed by “snow spiders,” meaning it’s certainly not as safe as they had hoped.
Regardless of whether or not the mountain refuge is the ultimate safe-haven, Joel’s rallying cry for people to leave their bunkers could result in a larger population heading to the mountains where they can work together to share resources and build a safer home than they had in their isolated bunkers scattered across the country. Even with the snow spiders, humanity’s chance at long-term survival will be improved by more people leaving their bunkers and collecting in the mountains with Clyde and Minnow.
Monster Hunter Ending and True Meaning Explained
Joel inspires all the bunker dwellers to get an adventurous spirit!
At the end of Monster Hunter, Joel hasn’t just learned new skills and abilities, but he’s also learned something special about himself and found confidence in what he could become. At his bunker, Joel felt useless because he wasn’t a monster hunter, and even his fellow bunker dwellers could only point to his ability to fix the radio and make canned minestrone soup as his contributions to their community, but after making the 85-mile trek to find Aimee, Joel didn’t only discover new monster killing skills, but also learned how to use his artistic abilities to create the Monster Apocolypse Survival Guide.
Thanks to the survival guide and his radio broadcasts, Joel doesn’t only transform himself, but inspires others to leave their bunkers. Humanity might not be as strong as it once was, but Joel teaches them that cowering in a bunker isn’t a viable survival strategy in the long run. Thanks to his efforts at the ond of Love and Monsters, other bunker-dwellers feel empowered to leave their homes and brave the monsters to try to build a new life for themselves and the rest of humanity.
