In his memorable 2010 debut Monsters, British director Gareth Edwards created an ultra low-budget arthouse film that was part sci-fi, part travelogue, part road movie.
Edwards has moved on to bigger things but the world he created - humans watching on as slow-moving herds of massive, tentacled aliens colonise the planet - was clearly too good to leave behind. So here's the sequel, executive produced by Edwards and directed by Tom Green, who cut his teeth on Channel 4's gloriously quirky Misfits.
Swapping Monsters's Central American setting for an insurgency-wracked Middle Eastern country now plagued by American soldiers as well as 100ft monsters, Green adds more action, dialogue, swearing and sex and hopes for the best. It doesn't work. What made Monsters so good was its sense of quiet, numbed wonder: you can't replicate that in a shouty, shooty, Hurt Locker-style war movie. The special effects are great, the behind-enemy-lines plot is functional enough as a squad of soldiers head into the so-called Infected Zone to pick up four lost comrades, and there's one great, hallucinatory set-piece worthy of the original film. But mostly this feels more like an opportunity lost than a franchise gained.
Barry Didcock
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