I remember only vaguely the first Monsters movie and my review from back then said that I liked it a lot. As in that one, the alien monsters are just a backdrop - although in this film I would say that they are superfluous. The story is about a group of kids from Detroit who join the army, go in some Arabic desert and fight both monsters and insurgents.
The big big problem with this film is the length. It two hours long. From those, a quarter is just presenting the characters in a pompous way that doesn't really say anything about them, another is about hooting manly and being manly shouted at by their instructors, then the rest is about how they didn't absorb any of the training at all and how their manliness doesn't really do anything for them. I am being a bit mean.
I guess the message was that monsters are everywhere, from the people setting a dog on a little alien forcing it to defend itself and kill the dog, to the American forces mindlessly killing civilians, from the Arab insurgents who kill soldiers, to the maddened soldier who needs to kill everybody that even looks like an enemy. As usual, the alien monsters are just minding their own peaceful business.
Bottom line: the movie failed in a number of ways: bad character exposition, pointless length, stupid soldiering, a plot that has no need of the aliens. The (valid) point that it wanted to make was lost in all this noise.
The big big problem with this film is the length. It two hours long. From those, a quarter is just presenting the characters in a pompous way that doesn't really say anything about them, another is about hooting manly and being manly shouted at by their instructors, then the rest is about how they didn't absorb any of the training at all and how their manliness doesn't really do anything for them. I am being a bit mean.
I guess the message was that monsters are everywhere, from the people setting a dog on a little alien forcing it to defend itself and kill the dog, to the American forces mindlessly killing civilians, from the Arab insurgents who kill soldiers, to the maddened soldier who needs to kill everybody that even looks like an enemy. As usual, the alien monsters are just minding their own peaceful business.
Bottom line: the movie failed in a number of ways: bad character exposition, pointless length, stupid soldiering, a plot that has no need of the aliens. The (valid) point that it wanted to make was lost in all this noise.