Monsters: Dark Continent – Movie Review
Gareth Edwards, who moved on to do the 2013 Godzilla movie, got this opportunity because of his indie success ‘Monsters’ from 2010. There he explored what humanity means and how little it takes to turn humanity into chaos and destruction. For me it was something different with a nice message at the end of the film. So when I discovered that there was a sequel in the works, I was quite excited. Especially after seeing the trailer.
We follow a Michael Parkes (Sam Keeley) from Detroit and his group of close friends. We learn that they signed up for the military and all they want is to get out of Detroit. We learn that Detroit is not a great place to live and grow up in. The once proud and big working class city is nothing but a shadow of its former greatness. In this early stage of the film we get the usual tropes of a guy and his wife getting a kid and the last day party before shipping out into the middle east. Yes, the fact that the world is not populated with huge alien creatures, does not suddenly end all the wars that are going on. While the monsters in the first movie are limited to Mexico and parts of South America, they now spreaded into the Middle-East. Interfering with all the military operations that are going on down there. And that is where our group of friends ends up in. So we see them do their job with the occasional monster showing up here and there. Then they get called for a special mission and of course everything that can go wrong does go wrong.
If my written summary does not sound too promising then you read that right. This movie is a mess. Starting with all this cliche material in the beginning and the platoon leader being almost a caricature of the stereotypical military guy spouting his “shit rolls down hill” speeches. It’s all there and it’s not done very good. I’m not sure if it’s the actors or the script. I’m leaning towards the script since the actors, in some sparse fine moments, do deliver some good work. Which is a shame. Much like that really touching, eyeopening scene at the end of ‘Monsters’, we have similar scenes in this movie. Again one near the end. It’s beautiful, well done and poses the overarching question of who the real monsters are. There are a couple of scenes that ask this question. But they drown in the mess that is this movie. It wastes a lot of time with story elements that shouldn’t be there. Especially when it’s trying to make the audience bond with this group of friends (which did not really work for me at all) and then later feel with them when shit gets real. The movie’s runtime with 2hrs is far too long and several parts of the movie just drag on and on.
So while the first movie successfully focussed on smaller issues, this one tries to go a step further. What sounded rather interesting on paper, did unfortunately not really work on screen. Expanding the universe of that world, where giant creatures roam the the earth, could have been done differently. By expanding the story we get a lot of problems with plot holes that the first movie avoided by keeping the story very compressed. At least the visuals do work and they made it all look pretty good. The monsters do not make a hostile impression and more look like a herd of elephants. Nonetheless we bomb the crap out of them for some reason. Which is probably the more realistic element this movie has. You feel sorry for the creatures that basically just want to be left alone. On the other hand you can understand that there is action against them. But the movie misses to make that point of trying to convey why we fight against these creatures. For some reason this group of friends is also in the same platoon. Sorry, not gonna happen in todays military. They would be scattered all over the place in all kinds of different units. And that’s just two of the more problematic things going on in this film.
Closing words would be to only seek out this film if you really want to know the world of ‘Monsters’ a little better. Unfortunately the movie does not know what it wants to be. A military action movie or a film asking questions about humanity. Writer and Director Tom Green probably wasn’t the right guy for this material. There is a good movie in this one but it’s drowning in a lot of stuff that did not need to be in there. It’s too inconsistent throughout the runtime. But still… there are some great images in this film. Apart from the obvious shakycam syndrome, this movie suffers from, the overall camera work is nice.
5.5/10
