Looking for any way to get away from the life and town he was born into, Tripp (Lucas Till), a high school senior, builds a Monster Truck from bits and pieces of scrapped cars. After an accident at a nearby oil-drilling site displaces a strange and subterranean creature with a taste and a talent for speed, Tripp may have just found the key to getting out of town and a most unlikely friend. A young man working at a small town junkyard discovers and befriends a creature which feeds on oil being sought by a fracking company. This movie was a trip to memory lane. It's a modern version of movies such as E.T., Bigfoot and any other eighties and nineties movies where a kid finds and protects an alien (or other kind of creature) from a government or any other association. So it's not anything new, story wise, but it brings a whole new take to the genre. <br/><br/>I really loved Creech and its childlike behavior and the chemistry between Creech and Tripp and Meredith. <br/><br/>The action scenes looked great! The scene where they are chased through the town and make their escape by jumping the train was great to look at.<br/><br/>It's not a movie with great depth but it doesn't require to be. I've seen movies with more depth that really sucked. This one is so underrated and deserves more credit!<br/><br/>Great job, Chris Wedge! My wife and I took our two sons to this film based on the previews we had seen recently at the theater. The preview looked so awesome. A kid who befriends a monster that he uses to drive his "monster truck". Finally a breath of fresh air, we thought.<br/><br/>The first thing that became painfully obvious was the placement of Dodge trucks everywhere. You would think that the movie took place on some planet where Dodge was the only company that manufactured a truck.<br/><br/>The second observation is that the story is supposed to take place in North Dakota. The scenery in this film is beautiful, but be warned, do not come to North Dakota to see these landscapes. I know this because I live in North Dakota. Please, don't get me wrong here. North Dakota has charm in its own right. So why is it supposed to take place in North Dakota? It's to tie it to the mean old oil company that doesn't care at all about the environment, as the Dakota Access Pipeline has been making headlines.<br/><br/>This is where I feel duped by the preview. Had I known that the entire plot was an agenda driven environmentalists dream come true, I would not have spent the money at the theater. I actually went back and watched the preview online again thinking I had missed something. This is not the case. They actually avoided spilling the beans that this was agenda driven. Hollywood knows that that would have hurt the number of people who would go see this film.<br/><br/>This could have been something truly epic, however I cannot recommend going to see this film, or supporting it in any other way monetarily. <br/><br/>Remember ET, Back to the Future, Ghostbusters?? Remember how in ET the big bad developer was trying to bully Elliot's parents into selling their property so they could build a Wal-Mart?! Remember in Back to the Future where Doc and Marty are fighting the oil company that's trying to take over Hill Valley, so Doc builds a time machine to go back in time to "set things right"? What about Ghostbusters, where those three scientists discover that the ghouls and goblins are going to poison the public by running fast food restaurants hocking trans-fats, so the environmental protection agency steps in and gives the Ghostbusters all the funding needed to fight this evil power?<br/><br/>The above would have surely ensured flops, because people are sick of the agenda driven crap. Monster Trucks could have been so much more. It makes me sad.<br/><br/>Hollywood needs to get a clue. Objectively ridiculous but mostly fun, this is better than you could have predicted given the title but squarely aimed at a young and undiscerning audience.
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372 weeks ago