Micah Lloyd Excellent characters with emotional depth. My wife, daughter and granddaughter all enjoyed it...and me, too! Very good movie! You won't be disappointed.

Tyreece Hulme One of the best movies of the year! Incredible from the beginning to the end.

Aneesa Wardle The story, direction, characters, and writing/dialogue is akin to taking a tranquilizer shot to the neck, but everything else was so well done.

Beulah Bram A film of deceptively outspoken contemporary relevance, this is cinema at its most alert, alarming and alive.

daveb-60761 I'm baffled where there are so many reviews. I think it's more to do with expectation than of the movie itself. I haven't seen the first Monsters and saw this sequel as a standalone. In all honesty this is a brilliant movie, and here's the reason why:This is a movie about human nature - not aliens. It's about the extremes of people when faced with hopelessness. Whether you take the monsters as literal (ie. there's a fight against aliens in the middle east) or as a metaphor for an unsurmountable and 'alien' enemy fighters, the movie highlights: 1. the sacrifice of ones own identity, sanity, family and meaning. and 2. the senseless waste of 'collateral damage' for the greater good for a war that cannot be won.This realisation occurs to soldier as he watches the alien spores after the child dies, and the image of the commander losing his mind as the unstoppable mountain of aliens rise from the sand.The purpose of the aliens is not to create an alien or sci-fi movie. The aliens could just have well been replaced by a deadly virus, killer asteroid, or zombies. It's a story of human apocalypse, and madness of some types of human behaviour when illuminated by this context.

latakiahaze What a totally bizarre movie. First off it's called "Dark Continent" but the action takes place in the Middle East, not Africa.The first third of the film is populated by irritating and unlikeable jar heads whose idea of a good night out is sex with prostitutes, drugs and animal cruelty in downtown Detroit.Next, we move these Einstein's on to the Middle East (where I, for one, couldn't really care if they live or die). Now we introduce some strange looking aliens, the largest of which are like huge lumbering giraffes with hydra heads, who make whale- like noises. There is apparently a smaller breed who run like cheetahs mainly, it seems, to lure the clueless Marines into IED's.Later we are introduced to the baby of the species, one of which lives in a kids toy box and pops out like something out of a Disney movie to sprinkle fairy dust onto the desert floor.Now add to the mix the main "meat" of the movie, a violent and visceral incursion by the American Marines into Taliban territory. Yes, this is basically a war movie with monsters thrown in (for goodness only knows what reason). This is not a metaphor, not a satire, certainly not art-house, in fact, I can't really say what it is at all. I just kept thinking how Starship Troopers addressed the issues of patriotism and war (with aliens) in such better context so many decades before.Not totally without merit as some of the scenes are quite haunting but this film desperately needed an editorial snip to cut at least a half hour off the run-time and a much firmer focus on intention. The acting is also pretty mediocre, but then, if the director was as confused about his vision as he seems to have been, you can't really blame the players.All in all a major mess that needed far more real monsters and far less of the "real monster is man" cliché.

Michael O'Keefe My expectations went south in a hurry. Monsters take up mere moments of the screen time. The dark continent is now another name for Afghanistan. All the fast forwarding in the world will not make this movie what it is implied to be. But on the other hand, not totally worthless as a war movie.It has been about ten years since humongous tentacled creatures began trying to take over our planet. These monsters seem closer and closer to occupying the entire globe and the military is at its wits end trying to fight these horrid things off. In desperation, the military is lowering its standards for enlisting. Four young men from Detroit think they are hard and smart enough to help the army fight monsters.The writers, Tom Green and Jay Basu, sneak some monsters into the plot that has an American platoon trying to extract ambushed soldiers that are trapped in the alien infested Middle East. I am guessing the combination of the few monsters along with the vulgarity of guts, gore, violence, heartbreak and tribulations of warfare with the Taliban makes for a strong R rating. This movie lasts right at two hours and expect to leave tired. Maybe with more monsters and a bigger budget this could be a real thriller.Cast includes: Johnny Harris, Sam Keeley, Nicholas Pinnock, Jesse Nagy, Kyle Soller, Joe Dempsie and Uriel Emil.

Richard Boase This is an excellent movie. Beautifully shot, graded and cast. Well directed, well paced and with good, believable dialogue and characterizations. Horror movies in this genre are traditionally understood as externalizations of the current climate, and Monsters: Dark Continent elevates this tradition to new heights. The central message of the movie is that the Americans are chasing a nightmare/fantasy in Iraq and the middle east of their own making, and the more they kill, the worse things get. The reason I think, most people have canned this movie is because they prejudge it as racist (Dark Continent) or misguidedly expect it to be an entertainment movie. But this is presumably because those watching are not able to make the conceptual leap between watching a movie for entertainment purposes and creating a movie for the purposes of awakening mass consciousness towards a single, important issue: How the monsters spawn after they're killed is an allegorical play on how terrorism and extremism is seeded by American forces, through heavy-handed military intervention in domestic and local affairs in the middle east. Terrorism and the war in the middle east has been a pervasive theme throughout the first two decades of this millennium, and American audiences aren't comfortable with mixing reality and fantasy in a way which forces them to confront an uncomfortable truth. They want Entertainment or Documentary. Not allegory. This is a film with an extraordinarily simple message. Just like the first one, where the monsters represented middle America's fear of Mexico and South America generally, the monsters in the second film represent America's fear of Arabs and Islam. It's illustrative, but sadly was not well received, and so while it describes the Americans hysteria neatly, most, if not all of the reviews I've read of this film missed its central idea. A sad reflection of modern American critical culture!