On Monsters: Dark Continent

In 2010 Gareth Edwards wrote and directed Monsters. A road movie with an alien invasion twist. It is a beautiful and haunting film that has a quiet intelligence running through it. Edwards proposes that the monsters that had found a new home on Earth were benign, yet ends with a terrifying unseen American military intervention.

Four years later, Tom Green has written and directed Monsters: Dark Continent. Continent organically evolves from where Edwards left off. The monsters have made Earth their home and have become a part of life. A part that military organisations cannot let exist. Green takes us into the Middle East where American intervention in Middle Eastern conflicts is complicated by the monsters, offering them two fronts to fight on.  

The film presents us with four young Detroit men, unskilled and untrained, volunteering to go to the Middle East, presumably suggesting that the army is so stretched it will take the uninitiated. In these early stages the dialogue lacks subtlety and the characters are hard to like, but the photography has an air of authenticity to it that makes for some impressive desert scenarios.

Where Green’s skill lies in moving Edwards’s narrative forward is his ability to very quickly undercut audience expectation. What we think is a buddy war movie (with the alien addition) turns in one of the film’s best sequences into a psychological survival story. It is in this second half where the film is at its best, becoming a welcome addition to the American war genre.

Continent is not the quiet beauty of Monsters, but it has its own aggressive charm that when it kicks it becomes a solid piece of storytelling and a smart development on Edwards’s film.