Review of Monsters: Dark Continent (2014) by Erich W — 15 Mar 2015

Monsters: Dark Continent is a war drama over all else, with the towering Lovecraftian-esque monsters serving as background eye candy and the occasional hindrance for the G.I. characters. Keeping the formula that Gareth Edwards' had used in the prequel - Monsters (2010) - fairly close to his chest, director Tom Green presents a slow-burn monster movie that is told through the eyes of the military rather than the eyes of a duo trekking through the jungles of Central America.

Almost identical to Battlefield: LA (2011), Dark Continent spends the first twenty minutes painstakingly introducing the barely distinguishable from each other core characters of the movie - Michael, Shaun Williams (Parker Sawyers), Frankie Maguire (Joe Dempsie) and Karl Inkelaar (Kyle Soller) - as they spend their last day in Detroit on a night of unadulterated fun before being deployed for a tour of duty in the Middle East, whilst also introducing their future squad leader, Sgt. Noah Frater (Johnny Harris) on the other side of the planet. The characters are then thrown into the barren Middle Eastern desert as the military attempts to quarantine the monsters - now called "MTRs" - that have made their way out of Central America - from the first movie - in search of more water given the creatures' dependency on the resource.

In order to generate a boogeyman for the movie to focus on instead of the monsters, the plot contrives itself - a ham-fisted allegory of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars - by having the military's efforts in stopping the cephalopod aliens within the region causing the insurgents to be born from the collateral damage of the conflict, and this is ultimately what Dark Continent primarily revolves around; Sgt. Frater and his team's efforts in dealing with the insurgents while the MTRs trample around in the background.

Green and screenwriter Jay Basu's act of keeping the real threat in the background allows them to plunge their hands into the topic of war and the effects that it has on soldiers, particularly Frater and the younger soldiers under him. In the vein of other squad-based dramatic war movies - particularly Spielberg's Saving Private Ryan (1998) - but lacking the dramatic finesse and edge, the duo attempt to explore the morale and camaraderie between the soldiers under pressure, but they fail to hit the right notes due to the trite cast of unlikeable characters and bad, absolutely grating acting. The characters of Frater and Michael are more or less salvaged by the end but for the most part, Dark Continent's insistence on the human element will certainly annoy the same group of people that quickly grew frustrated with Ford Brody of Godzilla (2014).