This
week’s disappointment still hurts less than the previous week’s hollowness.
It occurs to me that in my thrashing of “Kite,” in choosing to abandon Fromage standards, I may have not only allowed the film victory over me but lost the proper opportunity to truly nail home how excruciatingly incompetent and unbearably boring it was. The only thing sparing it from scoring under a 0 rating was… um?
One moment.
1 Nega Shat
Expect that to be reedited into the actual review in
the near future.
Anyway, the biggest sin a b-movie can commit is
taking your time away while offering absolutely nothing in return. Anger can
still be an invigorating emotion but boredom is just downright agonizing to
experience for an extended length.
Case and point, “Monsters: Dark Continent;” a
masterpiece by comparison sheerly for leaving me with a feeling of crushing disappointment
rather than frustrated emptiness.
“Dark Continent” is a sequel to Gareth Edwards micro
budget masterpiece about human relationships and our perception of “The Other”
against the backdrop of an alien occupation, that one the hearts of critics and
the film industry at large, leading to him being selected to helm 2014’s successful
effort to raise “Godzilla” from the dead. His involvement with “Godzilla” also
resulted in his involvement with this film to be reduced to that of a mere
executive producer, which fittingly chops out all of the metaphor and cerebral ideas,
leaving a mess of disgusting military movie clichés that skate dangerously
close to being the worst possible sequel to “Starship Troopers” never made.
“Monsters: Dark Continent” follows a group of young men from Detroit who have enlisted in the Army. While they seem to enlist aiming to protect their planet from its extraterrestrial occupants, they’ll soon discover that perhaps the true “monsters,” are mankind.
There’s almost an unspoken rule that if your message
is dangerously cliché, you need to be able to present it in as nuanced and
subtle a way as possible. This is the fundamental failing of “Dark Continent.”
While the first film demonstrated spades of subtlety
in its acting and camera work, this film strikes with the blunt force of an SUV
crashing into a wall at 50 Miles per hour. The metaphor of the titular “Monsters”
is completely lost amongst a sea of military clichés that ultimately formulate
a story more focused on the conflict in the Middle East than the presence of the
alien beings.
One would think that this would be a terrific
opportunity to use the creatures as a means of comparing and contrasting both
sides of the conflict as a means of demonstrating how civil or “inhuman” either
side of humanity can be when juxtaposed to the seemingly pure aliens. While all
of the content is definitely there and I’d be more than willing to bet that may
have been the intent, director Tom Green doesn’t quite manage to balance the
alien presence against the backdrop of the war or human society.
Where “Monsters” built up a certain mystique around
its unseen creatures with the intent of contrasting their ultimate appearance
with the built up perception of them across the duration of the film, “Dark
Continent,” with its significantly higher budget, lacks the same sort of subtlety.
The creatures are fully displayed and detailed, with no shroud of shadows or
lighting to mystify their existence and are always portrayed as victims to the
loud, obnoxious, unlikable, and borderline jingoistic American military.
As a science fiction film, it fails due to their
presence exacerbating the unlikability of the main cast, whose involvement in the
plot somehow still boils down to fighting Middle Eastern “insurgents.” As a war
film, the ultimate track that the plot goes down is so irritatingly cynical
that you can’t even invest in the cast’s plight emotionally.
About the only nice thing that I can say about “Monsters:
Dark Continent” is that its cast does do a decent job making the best of the
material that they are given and the money that goes into the creature effects
certainly shows. Yet, when its predecessor manages to make a genuine
observation on the human condition with far less special effect razzle dazzle,
I’m left to question just how much worth those strengths really have.
1 Shatner
Bottom Line: "Monsters: Dark Continent" is competently made and passably "B." Unfortunately, all of this amounts to it being mediocre at best.
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