So: great news if you thought Monsters was lacking a cheesy voiceover, naked girls and a deafening amount of guns - the sequel makes up for all those glaring deficiencies in spades.
Unless, of course, you actually liked the first film for its quiet comments on US foreign policy, nifty improv character work and fantastic use of real natural disaster areas and home-made CGI in lieu of a big budget. In that case, you may spend vast chunks of Monsters: Dark Continent in a kind of shell-shocked bewilderment that.... this was obviously the natural direction to take this film.
I'll be honest, I walked straight out of the brilliantly tense '71 and into the screening of Monsters: Dark Continent. And weirdly for a thriller set in Belfast amid the Troubles and an SF war film with giant freaking aliens... structurally and thematically they had a lot in common. Except '71 does it better on every level, and I wanted to walk out of M:DC after the first five minutes of terrible blaring music and mostly naked girls being strippers. And having sex. And giving birth. It's not even exaggerating to say that women aren't actually allowed to speak in this film unless they're nearly naked and doing one of the above.
It's a lesson in economy to watch the set-up at the beginning of each of them try to do the same thing - '71 has a few snapshots of a barracks boxing match; training marches in pouring rain and a spare intro of the protagonist's small brother? Son? Hard to tell, and it's never explained. Doesn't matter; it's a nice small detail. We don't need to know anything else about Gary in order to root for him - he's a squaddie just out of training and being sent into Belfast as emergency back-up, and we're almost as bewildered now by it as he was then.
What it doesn't have is: a cliched and obnoxious voiceover from the main character. Which is what is shoehorned into the start of M:DC as it veers into some kind of hackneyed homage to 8 Mile, complete with a gigantic DETROIT banner across the screen, printed with the US flag. What the actual?
That's what I don't get: half of this is shot like an arthouse film - long, intense close ups (and I mean close-ups, like, an eye or a mouth filling the entirety of the Imax screen for ages), no dialogue; no explanation. This is not the usual cinematic language for a film that then keeps chucking in a cheesy voiceover and some excruciatingly hackneyed dialogue. The beginning plays like an R-rated Transformers - Ok, I can see why somebody made a District 9 comparison; it's that kind of visceral. But M:DC is also dumb as fuck at key points, and District 9 wasn't - it had a gameplan; had a cohesion and a cultural certainty. I'm not a huge fan, but I can see what Neil Blomkamp was trying to do, and it was relatively fun on first watch. With M:DC, I just kept sinking lower and lower in my seat last night wishing all the characters would die quicker. I have no clue what anybody's name was - even after they flash up on screen, complete with their entire military history; I still don't give a fuck. These are not interesting characters. Telling me I should care about them because they serve together and had crappy childhoods does not make me actually care about them.
More importantly, if this is supposed to be some kind of commentary on current policy - where the hell is this even supposed to be taking place? The first film had a definitive location and made it strange with giant freaking aliens all over the place. This is... well, going by the absolute lack of anything specific, you're inclined to think generic Middle East. Watch the news today and stick a pin in the screen. Except, they went and called the bloody film Dark Continent, which usually refers to Africa. And towards the end what looks like some... Tuareg people turn up, so.. North Africa; Algeria/Libya? One of these things is not like the other. US troops in either of these places have a very different significance to US troops in Iraq, Syria or Afghanistan.
See, between a film about Northern Ireland set in the 70s and futuristic war film with gigantic aliens... I'd usually be all about the genre. Except... they already made an SF version of '71, and it's kind of a candidate for My Favourite Film of All Time: Dredd.
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