Gareth Edwards' 2010 directorial debut, Monsters, was the launching pad to a soaring career that includes Godzilla and an upcoming Star Wars spinoff. While many look back on it fondly, I've always found it somewhat overrated. Visually speaking it is incredible what Edwards was able to pull off on a sub-$1M budget, but it never really lived up to the potential of its allegorical premise. Maybe that's what producers behind the unnecessary sequel, Monsters: Dark Continent, were hoping to fix by completely changing gears into a war movie. Maybe they saw connections to be made with our ongoing War on Terror. If that's the case, they've done a terrible job of getting that message across.
It's not completely unheard of for a sequel to deviate so far from the original film. Look at the transition made from Alien to the action-intensive Aliens. That's where the comparisons with Monsters: Dark Continent end, though, it actually has more in common with a film like Jarhead, and that's not a compliment. Ten years have passed since the events in Monsters, and the "infected zones" have spread all around the world. That includes the Middle East where our military is still very much engaged with insurgent forces. While most of the world has grown accustomed to the creatures' presence, the war-happy U.S. is dropping bombs on them everywhere, including the Middle East, which has made the locals hate us even more.
Economically-ravaged Detroit is where the story begins to take shape, though, as a trio of hometown boys led by Michael (Sam Keely) look to escape their dead-end lives by going to war. Through Michael's glum, cheesy narration we learn of the boys' various hardships, which amounts to being poor and rowdy street urchins, basically. They enter the fighting ready for a big adventure, ready to kill anyone and anything that moves, but of course they get more than they bargained for. Under the command of mentally frazzled Sgt. Frater (Johnny Harris), they find that combat is about a lot more than squeezing the trigger. 
Or at least they would if the screenplay, co-written by director Tom Green and Jay Basu, had a clear perspective but it never goes beyond extremely flimsy characterizations. The soldiers, who we barely can tell apart they are so poorly defined, make the expected transformation from young men to figurative "monsters" themselves on the battlefield. As for the literal monsters, which still look impressive due to generally strong direction by Green, they lumber around in the background not doing very much. Are we sure Edwards didn't direct this because that sounds an awful lot like his Godzilla! The war scenes are extremely well done and Green has a firm grip of the action, staging the firefights well and keeping track of the chaos. It just takes a long time to get there and none of our time spent waiting is very interesting or enlightening.Monsters: Dark Continent might have worked better as a completely original effort, because surely it won't satisfy anyone looking for a continuation of what the first film started.
Rating: 2 out of 5
