Reed Alexander's Review of Monsters: The Dark Continent (2014)

You know what?! When you tell me you're going to give me a movie where marines fight aliens, you had sure as FUCK better give me a movie where marines fight aliens.

By the description, you would expect that some marines performing their general duties in the Middle East instead wind up holding off a sudden alien attack. You would be wrong. When you start watching the movie you could also think, "Okay, so this has been going on for ten years according to the exposition, so it's about marines fighting aliens while also dealing with insurgents in the Middle East." You would also be wrong.

By the way, apparently this movie is a sequel to the movie Monsters (2010), which I actually rather liked. But the two are in almost no way related and, while the first delivers on its promises, this one regularly disappoints.

SPOILERS!

Besides the few scenes where the marines just bomb the damn aliens back to the stone age without much issue, there's really only one scene where they even fight an alien, and yes, I mean "an" as in singular, as in just one fucking alien.

You know what? I'd have been cool with the marines mostly fighting with the locals if the whole time they were at least fighting the damn aliens as well. Nope.

Also, I'd like to point out the only two black actors in the whole damn movie die in the first thirty minutes. So this is what were going for? Not even trying are we... you know, if you're trying to avoid being "just the typical war movie," you could at least let the only two black actors in your fucking movie have a fighting chance for some screen time. Fucking seriously.

Anyway, where the fuck was I? Oh yeah. So in here, somewhere, is a metaphor for war in the Middle East and that every time we lob a bomb at "The Monsters" (insert ISIS or Al-Qaeda or The Talaban or whatever), the monsters get bigger and the locals start thinking we're the real problem and not "The Monsters." Great, fucking bravo, Captain Obvious. Two things... No-fucking-one is going to peal that message out of this acid-laced shit show. Two, you could still tell that story and give me marines fighting monsters. Instead you wasted mine and everyone else's time with some jerk-off movie about two half-wired soldiers "finding" themselves in the middle of the fucking desert while the actual movie plays on in the background.

I came here for fucking monsters! At least in the original film they gave me fucking monsters. And you know what? They also had some cocked up metaphor in that movie AND IT MADE SENSE and they still gave me monsters!

This movie suffered desperately from esoteric, completely meaningless, Gladiator (like those moments from the movie Gladiator with falling flower peddles and purple clouds) moments that make no fucking sense at all and takes minutes away from the time where they could be giving me fucking tentacle beasts FIGHTING GODDAMN SOLDIERS WITH FUCKING MACHINE GUNS.

You know what I was going to bitch about? The very premise of the military struggling against a beast that can be bulls-eyed by a tomahawk missile from half a mile away. But fuck it! I don't even have to go into that kind of detail with this shit show!

Fuck this movie and the tentacle beast it road in on.