Monsters: Dark Continent

The movie is called Monsters, but similar to the first, the monsters have so little to do with the story, even more so in the second than the first.

It's all about male bonding during military time as a platoon of boys from the same hood in Detroit go to war together in the Middle East.

The picture moves quickly, never a dull moment, very kinetic movement. Good action and lots of good war scenes.

The acting could used improvement. All the screaming and crotch grabbing did not convince me of their military standpoint.

But director Tom Green is definitely a good visual artist here. The imagery was very instance. Very good cinematography.

Visual effects were decent as well.

Total exploitation of war that ads a sci-fi fantasy elements with the monsters, used only as a backdrop no different than the dessert the movie takes place in.

Overall, I like the movie, despite how little the monsters have to do with the story at all. It seems misleading going into it, however.

The beauty of the original 2010 Monsters was its profound statement, Dark Continent satisfies the original naysayer's with action, and not much else.

The initial 2010 film Monsters was a profound parable about humanity and its interactions with one another that used an 'alien invasion' as a mirror for this introspection. It is an independent film I adore and can not recommend enough. Four years later, with seemingly no connection to the original's genius creator Gareth Edwards, Monsters: Dark Continent is released, with absolutely no relation to the 2010 film in both scope or talent.

Though the term 'derivative' does not imply subservience in its definition, quite often it is used as a descriptor for inferiority, and Monsters: Dark Continent warrants the adjective. When I first learned of a sequel to Monsters, I was aghast, for the narrative had been told in its entirety. When I saw the trailer, I was mortified of the bastardization of the beautiful film into Hollywood action drivel.

With the scope of potential from its predecessor being a peak of perfection to the lows of my expectations of pure garbage, Monsters: Dark Continent falls somewhere in the middle but certainly closer to trash. In truth, Dark Continent tries to be like its original in using the alien invasion to be an allegory for the war efforts in the middle east. Unfortunately it feels terribly superficial and contrived.

There is no beauty in the story telling of Dark Continent. The dialogue is poor and voice overs are used constantly to convey the narrative rather than creative artistry. Monsters: Dark Continent is neither philosophical nor intelligent in the manner of its originator. Writer and director Tom Green tries to speak of the war but it is in a very ignorant and uninformed perspective that is neither deep or even unique.

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What a load of pretentious, art w*nk nonsense this film really is.

It's bad enough that the story is paper thin and the characters are as unlikeable as an upset stomach (one minute gangsta tough, the next screaming like babies) but the direction is shocking.

It's like a frustrated art student trying out every possible style of image capture. Long shots, close shots, lens flare, angled, shaky cam, slow mo and none of them working.

One pointless scene of a helicopter taking off showed it's ascent from at least 10 different angles - outside looking up, inside looking out, inside looking inside, outside different angle etc etc.

Every character must have had at least two shots of them silent screaming from the Dummies Guide to filming internal angst.

Things aren't explained, geography is not established and you can almost feel the makers telegraphing their contempt to the audience that 'if you don't get this, you're too stupid'.

It's not engaging, thought provoking or entertaining. And when it's finished all you can contemplate is the utter pointlessness of the whole film.

I know many complain of studio execs interfering with a film but you really have to question who greenlit this laughable project or signed off the finished product for general release.

Whoever it was can't tell the difference between a movie and a flickerbook of cool filtered Instagram pics.

"Why am I here? What am I doing here?"

Gareth Edward's low-budget feature debut, Monsters, made some noise with critics as well as with Hollywood producers who decided to hire him for the latest Godzilla remake, which I happened to enjoy quite a bit. Since then he has become a household name and is already working on a Star Wars anthology film and on the Godzilla sequel. Edwards managed to direct an entertaining sci-fi film using alien monsters as the background to tell the story of a journalist trying to escort an American tourist through an infected zone in Mexico back to the US. The film created a wonderful atmosphere and in a lesser way served as an allegory on the US immigration system.

Five years later, we get a sequel to Monsters and a new director. This is Tom Green's first feature film and he had a bigger budget to work with than Edwards did, but unfortunately the sequel is a mess and a bore. It was by far the longest two hours I've had to sit through in a movie all year. It tries to follow a similar premise as the original film by being an allegory of sorts, this time about American intervention in the Middle East and it too leaves the monsters as an afterthought. The soldiers are sent overseas to fight the monsters (which could easily represent the terrorists in our world) who have spread all the way to the Middle East, but in a way these soldiers become the real monsters. The allegory is heavy on this one and it doesn't quite work as well because it is too lazy and simple. The characters aren't interesting at all and no one stands out here. They even have to resort to using voice-over narration to introduce each character because there was no interest in character development whatsoever.

The sequel takes place several years after the original and now the monsters have spread through different parts of the world. At the same time, an insurgency has broke out in the Middle East and soldiers are being deployed to fight off the insurgents and destroy the monsters in that deeply infested area. Michael Parkes (Sam Keeley) grew up in Detroit and has been training in the military for the past two years along with his native friends: Frankie (Joe Dempsie), Karl (Kyle Soller), and Shaun (Parker Sawyers). They are all being deployed to the Middle East together and are ready to make a difference. After a few weeks of light fighting the recruits are sent on a mission with Sergeant Frater (Johnny Harris) to rescue some soldiers in the Infected Zone. This is where the real fight begins for the new recruits.

I can't complain about the aliens being simply a background for this clichéd anti-war film because it was the same thing in the first movie, but Dark Continent doesn't even take its time to develop interesting characters. The story is incredibly lazy and all the characters are unsympathetic. I felt the extremely slow pacing take its toll on me and I understood that it was trying to explore the human behavior in extreme conditions, but it did so in a very lazy way. The subtext here isn't nearly as provoking as it was in the original. I get it that Green is trying to show the irony of the world crumbling around us as we ignore it and still continue to destroy each other, but it simply didn't do anything for me.

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In 2010, a British visual effects designer named Gareth Edwards released the feature film "Monsters", which he wrote, directed and edited. The movie that he (personally) shot in five countries over a three week period with a cast, crew and equipment that fit in one van, a film which he put together for under $500,000 made over $4 million worldwide. Edwards was rewarded with the opportunity to direct 2014's "Godzilla" reboot. Critics and audiences, who gave "Monsters" generally positive reviews, were rewarded with a sequel, "Monsters: Dark Continent" (R, 1:59). But before we talk about whether the sequel really qualifies as a reward, let's set the stage for the second film by taking a quick look back at the first.

The story of the original "Monsters" has NASA bringing samples of possible living organisms back from one of Jupiter's moons, only to inadvertently introduce Earth to a new species that is larger and deadlier than anything currently on the planet. The Monsters end up spreading throughout northern Mexico and a quarantine of that half of the country is planned. The focus of the film is the efforts of a photojournalist to get his employer's daughter safely out of Mexico and back to the U.S. without getting killed by the monsters or trapped in the quarantine zone. The sequel picks up about ten years after the first film ends and has all new characters in a completely different setting and with a very different plot.

The production schedule for "Godzilla" prevented Edwards from directing "Monsters: Dark Continent" (although he did serve as Executive Producer) and the sequel's writers, Jay Basu and Tom Green (the latter making his directorial debut with this film), made the sequel about the soldiers who are fighting the monsters. These creatures are about 300 feet tall and look like a spider, an octopus and a cockroach somehow all made a baby together and it was shot up with more steroids than every professional baseball and football player on the planet could use in a lifetime. No longer confined to Mexico, these creatures have become a world-wide problem. The U.S. military is trying to bomb the monsters into oblivion, but, at least in the Middle East, the collateral damage from those bombing campaigns has created a dangerous new insurgency that troops on the ground are needed to quell. As in the original film, the follow-up is mostly a story of human survival, with the monsters practically fading into the background (a point that some praise, but many criticize). The main focus is on a squad of Soldiers from Detroit who end up fighting the local insurgency under the battle-hardened Staff Sergeant Noah Frater (Johnny Harris). The member of the squad with which Frater ends up spending the most time is Private Michael Parkes (Sam Keely). Parkes is as scared as Frater is determined. Although we see the squad on patrol, and even killing one of the monsters with the small arms that they carry, most of the action takes place on a mission to rescue four fellow soldiers who are believed to be trapped by the insurgents. As is always the case in combat, these young soldiers have to depend on each other and on the wisdom of their leaders if they are to survive. And, as is often the case in war movies, inexperience clashes with experience, idealism clashes with reality and each soldier has to defeat his fear before he can ever hope to defeat the enemy. This film is a combination of "The Hurt Locker", "Saving Private Ryan", "Platoon" and "Starship Troopers", but with much more intensity.

"Monsters: Dark Continent" delivers in terms of the emotions experienced by soldiers in high-stress situations, but that's all it does. For one thing, everything about the marketing of the film – the title, the movie poster, the trailers – is misleading. Based on the title, I expected combat in the deepest, darkest jungles of Africa (maybe like a modern version of "Predator"), not a story set in the villages of the part of northern Africa that is better described as part of the Middle East. Based on what I saw and heard before seeing this movie, I also expected lots of battles against, you know – monsters. The monsters really are gigantic, frightening, bad-tempered destruction machines, but they are mainly relegated to the role of background scenery. We see the insurgents take more lives than the creatures of the film's title. In the few scenes where we observe the monsters up close, we mainly just see them destroying a few buildings, when we can tell that they're capable of so much more. (Oh, the tragedy of wasted monster potential.) Even though I don't feel like I got what I paid for, I was impressed with the performances of the actors playing soldiers, but that wasn't enough for me… or maybe it was too much. The action showing each man beneath the warrior was so incredibly intense that I'm hard-pressed to call this movie "entertaining" and the over-grown creepy-crawlies which could have added a lot to the story were largely MIA. "C+"