October 17, 2014 Leigh Singer

Monsters: Dark Continent

Taking the Alien franchise as your starting point is a bold but risky move. Not so much the concept of aliens themselves – though as with Monsters, Gareth Edwards’ 2010 breakout original, the ETs-on-earth provide backdrop – but the idea of reinventing your series each time out.

Ridley Scott’s Alien is a sci-fi-horror hybrid, effectively a haunted-house-in-space. James Cameron’s Aliens armed and adrenalized the concept to make a sci-fi-action/war epic. It was an inspired change of pace that honoured yet expanded on a classic to produce not just a sequel but an equal.

Monsters is, at heart, a road movie/romance disguised by the – rightful – acclaim for Edwards’ DIY VFX ingenuity. Monsters: Dark Continent’s mission, like Cameron’s, is all-out war movie: US military grunts under fire in an unspecified, Middle Eastern desert setting. It’s bleak, brutal – and yet, bafflingly light on the monsters themselves. While we see plenty more E.T.s than in Edwards’ film – both the strange giant tree/crab combo with squid-like appendages and smaller, galloping star-faced herds – their impact on both plot and human characters is negligible.

Edwards too kept the creatures (now called MTRs) largely off-screen, but, crucially, still allowed their presence – and absence – to shape his story. Here, the US soldiers’ desert mission is a rescue operation. The enemy are local insurgents, whose weapons are IEDs and RPGs. The MTRs plod about in the background, occasionally stray too close to the action and are taken down easily by gunfire or aerial bombs. You keep waiting for a key scene where the creatures infiltrate the story’s DNA. It doesn’t come. In fact, there’s a strong argument that you could remove all evidence of them from the film entirely and barely notice the difference. Alien’s face-hugging xenomorph would be turning in its egg sac.

What’s worse is that you’d never guess this outcome from the strong, muscular filmmaking of the opening scenes. The impressive titles, reminiscent of a sci-fi Se7en, neatly and explicitly connect up this film, set some 10 years on, to the previous one. There’s even a disturbing but potent early scene on the soldiers’ Detroit home turf of an illegal dog/alien fight, which sets up high expectations of interspecies interaction to come. Such hopes are dashed nearly as unexpectedly as the poor mutt.

At every turn, Monsters: Dark Continent is haunted by the ghosts of similar, superior films. The establishing act of hometown buddy bonding before a tour of duty, so sensitively evoked in The Deer Hunter, is retooled here as a sleazy stag-do. There’s the traumatized veteran soldier who can’t return home (The Hurt Locker), the brotherhood forged in combat (Restrepo) and, the now obligatory style of depicting modern warfare: chaotic shaky-cam, rat-a-tat editing and distorted or dropped-out sound. It’s perhaps unfair to expect the expertise of a Paul Greengrass or Steven Spielberg, but the one major action set-piece here constantly crosses the line between conveying the disorientation of men under attack and confusing the audience.

It’s frustrating because elsewhere debut feature director Tom Green, whose stellar work helped launch TV’s Misfits, clearly has an eye for striking compositions. There’s a great shot midway through of a soldier, collapsed on the ground, his head reflected in his fallen comrade’s spilled blood, that conveys the story visually and emotionally. And a beautiful, bio-luminescent climactic scene shows what might have been with more creatures featured. He and his cinematographer Christopher Ross capture Jordan’s unforgiving desert scapes with an artistry that belies the film’s relatively low-budget. In fact tech credits across the board, from Neil Davidge’s soulful score to the visual effects team’s impressive work, are first rate.

The cast, too, seem thoroughly committed. It’s good to see Johnny Harris (London to Brighton, Welcome to the Punch) in a rare lead as the relentless Sergeant Frater. Sam Keeley, Joe Dempsie (Game of Thrones) and the younger cast all immerse themselves in their roles, although the large number of British and Irish actors means that accents occasionally slip, which is an unnecessary distraction. Overall, though, there’s simply not enough good material to distinguish these young men from each other or to make us really care about them, other than the obvious waste of youngsters cut down in the prime of their lives.

This is Monsters: Dark Continent all over: intense, but not resonant; promising ideas that simply aren’t delivered upon, which no amount of technical craft and occasional inspiration can conceal. There’s still potential life in the series and the idea of ringing the changes on Gareth Edwards’ original is still worth pursuing. Just don’t make the monsters so elusive that they pretty much elude the film itself.

The Verdict

A frustrating, disappointing follow-up to Gareth Edwards’ left-field, low-budget game-changer, that’s more Battle: Los Angeles than Aliens. And who left the aliens out?

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Monsters: Dark Continent was reviewed at the London Film Festival – see the published article on IGN.