Monsters : Dark Continent

 MONSTERS : DARK CONTINENT

Director : Tom Green

Year : 2015

Genre : Science - Fiction

Rating : **

Made for a comparatively small budget of less than £500,000, Gareth Edwards 2010 sleeper hit 'Monsters' made the most of its suitably barren and quite evocative settings as well as sparsely used but ingenious special effects to create a wonderfully pensive and surprisingly moving science fiction drama. Telling the story of a couple of Americans who must traverse through the dangerous landscapes of Mexico which have now become infested with colossus alien creatures, 'Monsters' may not have contained a tremendous amount of genre-inflected action or even a great deal of on-screen spectacle. But what it lacked in visual wonder, it gained in emotion, empathy and a quite brilliant sense of menace.

Now we have its obligatory sequel 'Monsters : Dark Continent' and while it may contain just as much barren wastelands and incredibly impressive creature VFX as its predecessor, the film is a very different beast indeed. Directed by first-time filmmaker Tom Green (Edwards now serves as executive producer due to his commitments on 'Godzilla'), the movie is set 10 years after the events of 'Monsters' and follows a group of American soldiers who are sent to the Middle East to take control of the various insurgencies in the region while also destroying the many gigantic aliens which have since broken free from their South American habitat and are beginning to populate the entire globe.

To its credit, the film is shot brilliantly thanks to the terrific eye of cinematographer Christopher Ross while director Green (who previously worked on the Channel 4 cult drama 'Skins') clearly knows how to capture fear and dread quite deftly. But while 'Monsters' had a less than subtle subtext about the the subjects of immigration and social segregation which lent it a much more potent edge than it's many sci-fi counterparts, 'Dark Continent' puts satire or commentary to the wayside and instead focuses on being a simple and quite generic war thriller. And an exceedingly boring one at that - lurching from one dull as ditch-water set piece to the next without any narrative drive whatsoever. The cast, while good in their respective roles, are forced to portray the most unlikable, self - aggrandizing, breast-beating macho thugs seen in recent cinema while the eponymous monsters (when they eventually appear) severely lack the extraterrestrial beauty and perverse wonder of Gareth Edwards original creations. All in all, 'Monsters : Dark Continent' is a disappointingly ordinary sequel to a quite extraordinary ground breaker.