From the first agonizing
15 minutes or so, before fast forwarding nearly the entire film, looking for
monsters that I now hope killed off the entire cast of characters, I realized I
don't hate myself enough to waste 119 minutes of my time on a film that should
probably not have been made to begin with. While the film does not have the
energy I was hoping for, Monsters: Dark Continent, directed by
Tom Green, does have some interesting aspects that separate it from other
horror/science fiction films. For instance it focuses on characterization, mood
and tone, and it connects social, economic and other issues of war and violence
to the backdrop of a monster invasion. However, this might be part of the
issue, that the Monsters are more of a backdrop for other events of an unlikeable
cast of a machismo person's fantasy.
The story centers around
what is supposed to be a reluctant soldier/street-smart tough guy, who begins
the film's dialogue with, "Put a bullet in an alien." This is spoken
over footage of him emptying a clip into a wall covered in graffiti. A scene
that’s supposed to illustrate his bad-assness, but it all feels forced. Right
from the start we are shown and told, this is the sort of guy who romanticizes
or practices snuffing monsters. But it’s done in the same way that a socially
awkward barfly might try to reiterate that they are tough while slouched over
his drink and then give you one weak example after another.
Later, he meets up with
his grab-bag group of cliché frat boys, and while doing so, the film found a
way to send the message that women are personality-less sex toys and baby
makers. This little subtext becomes painfully clear when the guys meet up with
frat soldier #3 and he immediately abandons his girlfriend after she's just
given birth to his son. He abandons her to hang out with his boys and there is
no more reference really to that. This later relies on other tropes of the stereotypical
machismo male, like the Badass as a Macho, stereotypically manly guy banging
hookers and snorting cocaine. This is also blended with the Jingo trope, a
soldier who’s excited to serve his country and engage in combat. Because all
these rely on a similar mindset and point of view it’s difficult to not only
distinguish them from their machismo attitude of war and women but to really identify
with them.
There are only about
three scenes with women. Each scene is unapologetically sexist and panders to
not only a male audience, but doesn’t offer anything different. They could have
easily filmed this movie without any women in it at all, but clearly went out
of the way to portray them in the most degrading way possible. This was a bit
strange because the first movie is actually a bit more balanced as far as the
two roles go.
Overall, much of the carefully placed themes and action was so buried under macho gun play and man vs. man battles with almost no monsters whatsoever, that the underlying message gets fuzzy. The cast is so frat-house and relies so heavily on the archetypal tropes they personify to carry anything beyond the weak plot of a war based videogame’s downloadable content –in which, this might have actually been more successful. The main characters are one dimensional and immediately dislikable. The movie itself did more than fall flat, it is downright terrible.
Shuvon Hernandez
