This uncompromisingly boring and pointless film must count as the worst sequel of the decade. Gareth Edwards’s original 2010 movie, Monsters, packed a real satirical punch with its story of how creatures from outer-space had been quarantined by the US in Mexico. But this new film simply takes a standard war movie template and cynically bolts the monsters on to it: they appear briefly, sporadically and uninterestingly. Monsters have now somehow appeared in the Middle East: military action against them has resulted in collateral damage that has in turn caused insurgency, which the US army must also tackle. But there is no satire, or sense of any real human-v-monster interaction: it is just a cliched account of self-pitying and self-important sweaty macho men in battle, with CGI monsters somewhere on the horizon. We see the soldiers’ tough upbringing in Detroit (whose wreckage is fast becoming cinema’s most notorious cliche) after which they go into action. So it’s ruin-porn, then war-porn – between which there’s some porn-porn: scenes where they party with coke and hookers. One to miss.
