Name: Monsters: Dark Continent (2014)
IMDb: link to IMDB entry
Genres: Horror, Thriller Country of Origin: USA.
Cast: Johnny Harris as Noah Frater, Sam Keeley as Michael Parkes, Joe Dempsie as Frankie Maguire, Kyle Soller as Karl Inkelaar, Nicholas Pinnoch as Sergeant Forrest.
Directed by: Tom Green. Written by: Tom Green and Joe Dempsie.
The Three Acts:
The initial tableaux: We open to a glimpse into the origins of extraterrestrial life having infected Earth, and a rapid archival news slideshow to the current state of hot war against the aliens. We follow some recruits from Detroit who are about to ship out to the Middle East to fight the aliens. In separate cuts, we are introduced to Noah Frater, a sniper who takes out 'insurgents.' The film is unclear about who, if anyone, the insurgents are fighting for, but they are diagnosed as trouble.
Delineation of conflicts: Parts of the American military are on seek and destroy missions against aliens. Sometimes high tech, high payload ordinance takes out some of the giant aliens. Other times the aliens (many bigger than small mountains) take out US aircraft in the air. The aliens seem to reproduce and grow faster than they can be destroyed. The Americans are also on missions against local 'insurgents' whatever those are.
Resolution: None. The film under review is a sequel. There is enough failure to resolve in this film to allow for another sequel.
One line summary: Failed fight against alien invaders in Middle East, not Africa.
Statistics:
a. Cinematography: 2/10 A bit better than VHS, but not by much. Shaky cam, night vision images, bad clarity through rifle scopes, hideous overexposure.
b. Sound: 4/10 I could hear the actors, but incidental music was either jarring or irrelevant.
c. Acting: 0/10 There was acting? I've seen far better acting in high school plays.
d. Screenplay: 0/10 How was this as a SciFi film? Complete failure. Action film? You've got to be joking: all weapons fire looked fake; nothing was convincing. I've had enough of the eff-word, and this film was over-loaded. Were there any characters to identify with? No. Were there any characters to empathise with? No. Were there any characters that I cared about in the least? No. Were there any objectives (military or cultural) that were achieved? No.
As an anti-war film, the movie had a little virtue. In the film, huge amounts of money and resources were spent on the war effort, but there seemed to be no lasting positive results at all. There were plentiful negatives: dead US soldiers, dead locals, ruined houses, farms, whole chunks of cities. The US troops are clearly next to untrained, and have little chance at anything that they try.
The movie needed subtitles for the Arabic passages.
Final rating: 1/10 Wall to wall nonsense.
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