sci-fi

Spring (2015)

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fourstar

As you may expect based on its title, the movie Spring begins with death & finality and gradually blooms into a colorful array of new life & reproduction. The muted, brownish haze of depression in the film’s color palette slowly changes into something much more vivid. The film’s own energy & creativity works this way as well. At first Spring feels like a cloudy, almost run-of-the mill romance story, but then it develops into something fresh & exciting. Halfway between a sci-fi horror Before Sunrise and a rom-com Possession, Spring refuses to be understood in the context of a strict genre. Instead, it feels like the blooming of something new & unknown.

It’d be difficult to explain too much of Spring’s plot without ruining what’s special about it. The bare bones premise is that a young American named Evan travels to Europe as a means of forgetting the mess that’s been made of his life. After a brief period of playing tourist with some wastoid jocks (“Bro, I fucking blazed the Wi-Fi code!”), Evan falls for an Italian woman named Louise that gives his life a new sense of purpose & excitement. There’s a struggle to convince her that their romance deserves a chance and the relationship becomes an outrageously exaggerated form of “it’s complicated”. Revealing too much about Spring’s story would be a disservice to you so I’m just going to have to stop there and ask you to take my word for it: it’s a great movie.

To illustrate how difficult the tone & intent are to pinpoint here, check out the genre listed on the film’s Wikipedia page: “supernatural romantic science fiction horror”- expialidocious. You can go ahead and add the word “comedy” to that list as well, as the film is frequently hilarious in a satisfyingly adult way, like the line “Mention WWII and every American becomes a historian” or in a scene where the main characters are arguing about whether an art exhibit is “fertility imagery” or “Roman porn”. The two leads at the heart of the film’s romance in the film may not be fully developed characters (little is done to define Evan as a person besides contrasting him with Wi-Fi code blazing macho types). Louise similarly is defined less by her personality and more by her circumstance. Much like with a lot of sci-fi, though, character development is not the apex of the film’s ambitions. Instead, their relationship is more of a launching pad for exploring ideas like the vulnerability of falling for a complete stranger & what it means to desperately beg someone to love you, even if you know they’re dangerous. The film becomes more & more funny-scary-sweet-sad-surprising as it delves into these ideas and it literally starts crawling with life: lizards, bugs, bunnies, howling cats, etc. Spring is just as rejuvenating & full of promise as the season it’s named for.

-Brandon Ledet

The Zero Theorem (2014)

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fourstar

The most frequent complaint about The Zero Theorem, Terry Gilliam’s latest film, is that it’s “more of the same” without adding much more to the conversation. That is to say that it borrows too much form Gilliam’s own oeuvre, specifically the themes & imagery established in two of his biggest works: Brazil & 12 Monkeys. Honestly, I find it hard to fault a director for exploring “more of the same”, when “the same” is such a delicious plethora of weird ideas & images. Gilliam has an absurd talent for making outlandish, mind-melting worlds feel authentically lived-in and The Zero Theorem does not disappoint in that way. The future world portrayed here not only feels reasonable, but almost probable. This is partly because it’s sketched out in small, intimate spaces instead of the grand, sweeping strokes typical to Gilliam’s work. This not only makes the film feel oddly believable; it also helps to fix a problem I usually have with his work: pacing. For me, Terry Gilliam films, despite being impressive & entertaining, tend to feel about 6 hours longer than their actual run times. By narrowing its focus The Zero Theorem is more of an effortless breeze to watch than his usual fare, feeling much more concise in its narrative. It may be “more of the same” visually & thematically, but structurally it’s a much tighter execution than Gilliam’s normal mode.

The world Gilliam builds in The Zero Theorem is overwhelming, but not at all unlikely. Glowing screens dominate the landscape, allowing advertisements to follow humble number cruncher Qohen (Christoph Waltz) to his oppressive office job where he sits before even more screens. Although the imagery is overstuffed with weird machines & high pop art fashion, there’s a lived-in grey grime that covers the surface of The Zero Theorem that makes its vision of the future feel authentic. An especially telling scene shows a house party where all of the celebrants are dancing to their own individual music players, headphones in ears, eyes affixed to the computer tablets in their hands. The isolation of technology & cubicle work is by no means a new concept, but Gilliam pushes it to an extreme here. At first Qohen is on a humble quest to work from home (due to a perceived Joe Vs the Volcano “brain cloud” type disease), but then he finds himself trying to prove that the Universe & life itself are meaningless. As Qohen attempts to make sense of the film’s swirling black holes, weird machines, and futuristic sex work, he proposes that “Nothing adds up.” He’s corrected, “You’ve got it backwards. Everything adds up to nothing.” Ultimately, the film works that way as well. There’s a lot of ideas & themes about romance, technology, corporate dystopia, and the surveillance state floating around The Zero Theorem, threatening to amount to a grand statement about life, love, and nature, but ultimately the film decides that everything means nothing and we are each alone in our plights.

It’s the small-scale implications of The Zero Theorem’s plot that anchor its larger, more philosophical thoughts on the emptiness of everything. Although Qohen is trying to uncover the basic significance of the universe at large, it’s the goings on inside his hermetic abandoned church home that constitute most of the run time. The focus on Qohen’s struggle for self-acceptance, his embarrassing attempts at a love life, and his slavish, Waiting for Godot dedication to a potential incoming phone call provides a steady foundation for the film’s more ludicrous, throwaway concepts like virtual therapy and The Church of Batman the Redeemer. Waltz also does a great job of anchoring the film with a quiet, unassuming performance that’s far from his over-the-top hamming in Tim Burton’s Big Eyes. He leaves that hamming up to relative newcomer Lucas Hedges, who easily steals the back half of the film (which is no small feat, considering that half features a rapping Tilda Swinton).  In a lot of ways The Zero Theorem is more of the same from Terry Gilliam, but its narrowed focus & intimate setting affords it a more concise-feeling execution of ideas & images he’s explored before rather than an exact retread. It’s not the greatest thing he’s ever done, but it’s by no means an inconsequential work either. Instead, it’s another great, intentionally overwhelming film from a director who’s built a storied career full of them.

-Brandon Ledet

Jupiter Ascending (2015)

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onehalfstar

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The worst part about hating Jupiter Ascending is that I was really rooting for it. I’m not a Wachowskis super fan or anything (I barely know of their work outside The Maxtrix & Speed Racer); I just liked the movie’s basic concept & attributes. The idea of a sci-fi action-adventure with a female lead hit a lot of my sweet spots right out of the gate, but every one of those elements in the final product fell embarrassingly flat. The female lead, played by Mila Kunis, is for the most part a passenger & an observer while the action swirls around her (she’s a literal princess in need of saving, even). The action itself alternates from occasionally engaging to just painfully awful, anchored mostly by an against-all-odds unsexy Channing Tatum figure skating through the air (thanks to some kind of goofy laser boots) while terrible CGI obstacles crash & burn in his wake. That leaves the film’s sci-fi concepts to carry the load, which they occasionally do in a Richard Kelly kitchen sink fashion, but even those fade to long stretches of unimpressive action sequences. In short, Jupiter Ascending is a failure, when I really, really didn’t want it to be.

I’m just one dude, though! There’s a lot floating around in the film for people to latch onto. Beautiful, futuristic landscapes & architecture are populated with (unbelievably dumb-looking) alien weirdos like CGI lizard minions & humanoid owl things (that look like Ron Perlmen in Beauty and the Beast). Eddy Redmayne gives a (laughably) memorable performance as an evil alien dictator (who is just a wig & a sashay short of a killer drag routine). The aforementioned Richard Kelly brand of too-plentiful ideas contrast an undocumented immigrant’s life as a servant on Earth with distant & lavish alien aristocrats (who cares). There’s some (mildly amusing) honey bee worship (à la Upside Down) that results in the line “Bees are genetically designed to recognize royalty.” Other lines like “Your Earth is a very small part of a very large industry,” and “Time is the single most precious commodity in the universe,” also have a sort of a staying power (even if it’s as a joke). There’s a whole lot to love in Jupiter Ascending, but if you’re like me and have problems arriving on its wavelength, that excess gets ugly quickly.

If I had to boil what’s wrong with Jupiter Ascending down to a single fault it would be that it’s just so thoroughly uncool. I could be wrong and the movie’s late 90s Hot Topic raver aesthetic could be vintage enough to be cool again (if it was ever cool), but from my POV it just feels painfully outdated, like watching your stepdad desperately try to be hip. Imagine if The Fifth Element arrived 20 years late, dead serious (or at least not funny), and about as exciting as The Ice Pirates. Maybe a list of the character names will give you an idea of what I’m describing here: Jupiter Jones, Titus Abrasax, Phylo Percadium, Gemma Chatterjee, Stinger Apini, etc. If these names belong anywhere (and I’m not sure that they do) it’s on a TV screen, clogging up a low-rent Battlestar Galactica knockoff. Much of the film operates this way, feeling like a television show whose special effects budget was afforded way too much money and not nearly enough time to get the details right. I sincerely hope that there are people who have positive experiences with Jupiter Ascending, as I do find it interesting in concept, but it’s a movie I would love to never see or think about again. This might work out just fine, as even while I was watching I felt like it had been released nearly two decades ago.

-Brandon Ledet

Disturbing Behavior (1998)

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threehalfstar

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As I watched Disturbing Behavior for the very first time yesterday evening, something about it seemed strangely familiar. It didn’t take long for me to realize that it was quite similar to The Faculty, which was also released in 1998. In The Faculty, high school students are turned into aliens by their extraterrestrial faculty members and in Disturbing Behavior, high school students are turned into robots by their human faculty members. And, of course, each film has “the new kid in town” main character (typical for 90s teen flicks). After reading a couple of articles about the film, many compare it to The Stepford Wives (1975). I’m guessing this is due to the human to robot transformations, but that’s really the only connection I noticed. Despite all of the similarities it has to other films, Disturbing Behavior does a good job of standing out on its own. It’s campy sci-fi horror with a dash of high school drama, and I really enjoyed the film.

Steve Clark (James Marsden) and his family move to the small town of Cradle Bay after the tragic suicide of his older brother. Like all new kids, he immediately connects with a couple of outcasts at his new high school, Rachel Wagner (Katie Holmes) and Gavin Strick (Nick Stahl). As the film progresses, some “disturbing behavior” begins to occur in the group known as the Blue Ribbons, a clique of popular kids decked out in letterman jackets. With the help of a wacky janitor, Steve and Rachel find out the horrific secret behind the Blue Ribbons and attempt to stop their reign of terror.

It’s always great to see Holmes in a “bad girl” role since she’s best known for being the girl next door in Dawson’s Creek. I really enjoyed her in this film because she is great at pulling off the “misunderstood teen” look and attitude, and the chemistry between her and Marsden is pretty damn hot. She starred in the music video for The Flys’ hit single, “Got You (Where I Want You),” and I always assumed she was selected to be in the video because she was a pretty big teen idol during the time it was released. It turns out that the song made its debut on the Disturbing Behavior soundtrack (it plays in the opening scene and during the credits), so that’s probably the reason she was in the video. Mystery solved!

Viewing Disturbing Behavior through a critical lens makes it a horrible viewing experience, and that’s because it’s not a film that should be taken seriously. It’s loads of mindless fun and totally worth a watch or two.

-Britnee Lombas

Invisible Invaders (1959)

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three star

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Although it’s a lot more small-scale charming than hilariously inept, the black & white cheapie Invisible Invaders shares a lot with the alien takeover by way of zombie mind control plot of Ed Wood’s trashterpiece Plan 9 From Outer Space, right down to the over-reliance on stock footage and the 1959 release date. An essential difference between the two pictures, however, can be detected in the “Invisible” half of Invisible Invaders’ title. In Ed Wood’s Plan 9, the Earth invaders are sassy, overdressed fops who re-animate lifeless corpses as a Plan B (or “Plan I” really, seeing how far they got down their list of options). In Invisible Invaders, the plot to “inhabit the bodies of dead Earth men” is not only the initial plan, but also a necessary one, as the aliens who invade our planet are invisible alien spirits without physical bodies to call their own (which isn’t too far from the “Thetans” of Scientology).

You see, the titular Invisible Invaders have been around for a long time. A really long time. According to their initial contact in the film they, in fact, conquered & eliminated all life on the Earth’s moon more than 20,000 years ago, converting the natural satellite into their own impregnable space base and have been just kinda . . . chilling there ever since. Makes total sense, but what would prompt these superior, unseeable beings to finally snap out of their moon haze and set their eyes on the main planet? Because the film was produced during the cold war, the answer is, of course, that our rapid development of space travel & atomic weapons alarmed them to the point where they had no choice to intervene.  Their mode of intervention just happened to be raising & weaponizing our dead to work against us.

Even when this story is not being spelled out in detail by the invisible (yet very talkative) space aliens in question, it’s also reinforced by narration that just refuses to quit (or at least fade into the background temporarily). The endless narration is a blessing in disguise, as the film’s continuous use of stock footage & mock headlines would make very little sense without a vocal guiding hand. There’s a lesson at the heart of Invisible Invaders (that is thankfully spelled out for those not paying attention) that there are dangers in “the race for atom supremacy” that could be avoided if the nations of the world decided to stand side by side in a common cause instead of competing for the top spot in global supremacy. That message, however, is a little weak in comparison to the film’s surface, Ed Woodian charms: a body-snatching zombie plot; hilariously disconnected stock footage; very sciencey science labs featuring all kinds of smoking, bubbling liquids; and the kind of adorable practical effects you would expect in a 50s film in which you weren’t allowed to show aliens physically attacking the planet, due to their invisible nature. It’s a lot more likely that a modern audience would find the film entertaining for those cheap, campy thrills than its moralizing about the nuclear arms race, but it’s an adorable film all the same.

-Brandon Ledet

Escape from Tomorrow (2013)

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threehalfstar

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The tale of Escape from Tomorrow’s production is much more infamous than anything within the film itself. As the story goes, writer/director Randy Moore was hammering out some daddy issues he associates with the Disney World theme park in Orlando, Florida by staging a guerilla film shoot within the park. Filmed without Walt Disney’s permission, Escape from Tomorrow follows a family of tourists around the park, including shots staged in the resort hotel rooms, restaurants, and the amusement park rides themselves. Promising to turn the fantasy land into a live-action nightmare, the film has essentially been reduced to an anecdote about its production, without a whole lot being said about its actual quality. I went in expecting a dark, twisted sci-fi slow-burner that milks the park’s artificiality for an unnerving effect, but what was actually delivered was much more playful & amusing.

Backing up the director’s claim that he made the film as an exploration of his relationship with his father, Escape from Tomorrow’s protagonist is a hapless, lecherous doof of a man who drags his miserable family through Disney World as a means to forget his troubled employment status & loveless marriage. The characters sport the subtlety & nuance of an 80s sitcom family here. The kids are more or less whiny brats. The mother is a humorless shrew. The father is slack-jawed lecher that gets obnoxiously drunk & openly ogles giggling teen girls in the park in plain view of a wife he openly despises. As I’m sure happens often in that Florida sunshine, this group of Disney World tourists is having a full familial meltdown, even without the more sinister aspects of the plot & imagery coming into play.

The acting leaves a lot to be desired in Escape from Tomorrow (I desperately wish the idiot dad were played by Rob Huebel or Ken Marino), but there’s a sense of purpose to the family’s phony, exaggerated mannerisms. The whole film just feels playfully & intentionally . . . off. There are CGI decapitations, a pious reverence to the Epcot dome as a religious symbol, intentionally crude green screen shots that counteract the documentary feel, real life evil Disney queens (sex-crazed, of course), and a persistently cheesy Old Hollywood score that underlines the intense artificiality of the whole affair. It’s not a subtle film. It is, however, a delightfully goofy & irreverent one.

Anyone looking for a deep, prodding indictment of the nuclear, American family unit or a super creepy sci-fi freakout are likely to be disappointed by Escape from Tomorrow‘s who cares/nothing matters tone. The film succeeds in its quest to compose a film almost entirely from shots “stolen” from within Disney World (although the word “Disney” is bleeped out for legal reasons), but much like with all merchandise shoplifted from within those gates, the narrative it runs away with is frighteningly empty, like well-crafted kitsch. Much like with a lot of Disney products, it looks great & has an interesting backstory, but it’s a lot more satisfying as an eccentrically goofy trifle than a work of “serious” art.

-Brandon Ledet

Predestination (2015)

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fourstar

There has been a recent push to update the sci-fi genre in varied, interesting ways. While there have certainly been a few throwbacks to the traditional rocket ships & gunfire Flash Gordon adventure epics like Guardians of the Galaxy & Edge of Tomorrow, titles like Upstream Color, Under the Skin, Coherence, The Congress, and Beyond the Black Rainbow are searching for new territory for the genre to mine. They’re all unique works that can hardly be compared to one another individually, but as a group they feel like a refreshing revitalization of a genre that can sometimes get trapped within its own tropes & clichés. No matter how much I love these movies and what they’re attempting to accomplish, however, there’s just no denying the inherent draw of the sci-fi aesthetic of yesteryear. My favorite film from last year was Interstellar, not because it carved out new sci-fi territory, but because it felt authentic to old school sci-fi pulp you could read serialized in special interest quarterlies or hear in long gone radio plays. There’s a draw to this old fashioned sci-fi aesthetic that I’m glad to see hasn’t been left by the wayside in the wake of our recent crop of experimental exercises in the genre.

With its muted noir tone & a setting that spans from the 1950s through the 70s, Predestination firmly plants itself within this brand of sci-fi throwbacks. Based off of a 1959 Robert Heinlein short story titled “All You Zombies” (which was first published in an issue Fantasy and Science Fiction magazine, the exact type of old school serials I’m describing), the film has an authentically old fashioned take on sci-fi as a genre. It is undeniably cheap & trashy in the way its twists & turns are revealed to the audience (some of those reveals are not nearly as surprising as the movie seems to think they are) but that potential flaw is severely undercut by its straightforward style of storytelling. On paper the movie’s plot about time travel, secretive government agencies, and self-fulfilling paradoxes wouldn’t add up to much of value, but the way the story is framed as a drunken, embittered bar patron spinning a yarn for the barkeep is a perfect, no-nonsense approach to material that is nothing but nonsense.

There are some typical sci-fi adventure aspects to Predestination, like virtual reality helmets, “time jumps”, and young girls recruited to be male astronauts’ “companions” (an idea that reminded me of the similarly pulpy Journey to the Seventh Planet), but they’re counteracted with more concrete, noir-influenced images like trench coats, smoke-filled bars, homemade bombs, and a fedora on fire. Just as the always-tricky time travel aspect of the story starts to get overwhelmingly intricate, it also boils down to a typical action movie plot of trying to prevent a bomb from going off and catching the bad guy before he gets away. Even the story’s peculiar play with gender identity, which you would expect to mark it as a modern work, feels old fashioned & outlandish as it’s dealt with here, but straightforward performances from the two leads Ethan Hawke & Sarah Snook anchor that aspect well, just like the barroom storytelling framing device anchors the movie’s outlandish plot.

Predestination is neither a wholly unique work nor an exercise in good taste. It is, however, an example of the virtue of sincere, traditional acting & storytelling and how those elements can elevate ludicrous material into something special. Although its major twists & reveals may occasionally be telegraphed, it’s fascinating to watch the film reach those conclusions in its own time and on its own terms. There’s a sci-fi tradition to its sincere pulp sense of tonal balance, but it’s a vintage tradition that’s unconcerned with the new territory the genre’s been exploring in recent years. I appreciate the movie the way that any audience can appreciate a great storyteller, especially a rapt audience in a late night barroom who has nothing better to do than listen to a good yarn that becomes increasingly more outlandish as it stretches on.

-Brandon Ledet

Beyond the Black Rainbow (2012)

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In its opening minutes Beyond the Black Rainbow prepares its audience for its slow motion, abstract tone with phrases like “a state of mind”, “a way of being”, “a practical application of an abstract ideal”, and “the dawning of a new era in the human race and the human soul.” Beyond the Black Rainbow is not a straightforward cinematic experience, but instead works more like ambient music or a poem. In an age where the lines dividing cinema & television are becoming increasingly blurred, there’s an exponential value in movies that work this way. Recent mind-benders like Beyond the Black Rainbow, It Follows, Upstream Color, Under the Skin, and The Strange Color of Your Body’s Tears are much-needed reminders that there are still things cinema can do that television can’t, no matter how much HBO wants you to believe otherwise.

That’s not to say that Beyond the Black Rainbow is an entirely new, unfamiliar experience. Its 1983 setting intentionally recalls vintage psychedelic sci-fi titles like Zardoz & Phase IV that turned a hangover from optimistic hippie mysticism into something much more sinister. Instead of apathetic dystopias & mutated killer ants, however, it mines its horrors from new age psychiatry, or what it calls “therapeutic technologies”. Although it’s set thirty years in the past, Beyond the Black Rainbow occupies a decidedly futuristic hellscape made up of telekinesis, television static, clouds of smoke, melting walls, and intense hues of red & blue. It packs the same unnerving punch of a traditional horror movie experience, but that effect is distilled in a futuristic void. This becomes increasingly apparent as the movie’s killer, an . . . unorthodox psychiatrist named Dr. Nile, behaves more & more like a traditional horror movie villain until he reaches full Jason Voorhees status late in the film.

The slow, methodical pace of Beyond the Black Rainbow is not going to win over everyone in the audience, but for those who aren’t in a particular rush for the plot to be pushed along are sure to be wowed by its plethora of mind-bending, often horrifying images. It is a decidedly cinematic experience, one that depends greatly on the strengths of its potent sounds & images instead of more traditional markers like plot & dialogue that carry less hallucinatory films. It’s impossible to imagine Beyond the Black Rainbow working in the television format and there’s an increasingly valuable virtue in that aspect of its design. Go into the film with an open mind & diligent patience and you may find the experience to be therapeutic, especially in a time where some people claim that television has surpassed cinema as a superior visual art form.

-Brandon Ledet

Journey to the Seventh Planet (1962)

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fourstar

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Did you know that in the year 2001 we conquered long-distance space travel, achieved nuclear disarmament, and handed over the entire world’s sovereignty to the United Nations? Me neither, but I was really into shitty rap-rock & sneaking even shittier beers at the time so I might’ve been too distracted to notice. Needless derision aside, you really do have to admire the optimism of Journey to the Seventh Planet’s version of 2001. Years before the moon landing, the end of the Cold War, and, hell, even JFK’s assassination, the film felt like the world had its whole life ahead of it. Journey supposed that by 2001 we’d have a good enough handle on space travel to make it all the way to Uranus (sadly not pronounced the fun way here), but instead by that time we’d never made it past the moon and a lot of people were listening to Limp Bizkit.

Journey to the Seventh Planet did get one thing right, though: the universal appeal of 60s era pin-up girls never truly faded. The film tells the story of a small, all-male (of course) rocketship crew who journeys to Uranus (teehee teehee) and discovers that it looks an awful lot like California wilderness. This similarity is not only a frugal cost-saving measure, but rather part of a super cool plot device in which a nefarious alien spirit hypnotizes the rocket crew and brings their subconscious visions to life. During the atomic age opening monologue about the end of the arms race and the world-governing UN, a narrator warns “There are no limits to the imagination and man’s ability to make reality out of his visions is his greatest strength.” Apparently this extends to the visual re-creation of California forest & breathable air, but that’s not all. As the crew is composed entirely of lonely, horny, red-blooded space travelers, their hallucinations begin to take the form of voluptuous pin-up models who lure them away from safety one at a time so the alien spirit can try to hitch a ride back to Earth in their stupid, horny bodies. It’s pretty damn adorable.

The pin-up models and a forest covered Uranus are the most unique aspects of Journey to the Seventh Planet, but they’re far from the movie’s only charms. There’s also a plethora of adorable atomic age sci-fi staples like model rocketships, dinky rayguns, science babble about “atomic units” & “retrorockets”, and strange green lights that give the film a less-artsy Planet of the Vampires feel once the illusion is broken. The hypnotized men also conjure up images of stock footage “giant” spiders and stop-motion Harryhausen-esque cyclops lizard monsters that are legitimately pretty awesome. There is no shortage of cool ideas and goofy practical effects in Journey to the Seventh Planet and I much prefer its space alien pin-up version of 2001 to the much more depressing Limp Bizkit reality. I honestly believe that if it had chosen the much more memorable title Journey to Uranus it would have a much larger cult following, if not only for the juvenile giggling it would be sure to induce.

-Brandon Ledet

Alien Outpost (2015)

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There’s a pretty significant lie in the title of Alien Outpost. It’s the false promise that there might actually be some aliens in the film from time to time. If you wanted to attempt some truth in advertising a more appropriate title would be Dickhole Soldier Outpost or Operation: Naptime. Posed as a sub-Blomkamp “documentary” about the militaristic consequences of a near-future alien invasion, Alien Outpost has the feel of a warfare video game that features way too many thoroughly unlikeable soldier bullies idling their time and not nearly enough aliens brutally murdering them. It’s what I imagine Battlefield Earth would be like if you spent most of the runtime with the rat-brained man animals and Travolta only had a small cameo.

The aliens in question (known as “heavies” here), aren’t particularly interesting (especially in light of that Battlefield Earth Psychlo comparison), but they’re far and away the most entertaining element in a film where entertainment is in short supply. They’re tall, grey, humanoids who are running desperately low on laser “ammo” and are being hunted by American soldiers in a Middle Eastern outpost that I’m sure is supposed to call up metaphorical comparisons to the Iraqi occupation or something along those lines. Both that metaphor and the general nature of “the heavies” remain frustratingly undefined as the film focuses on the endangered, yet trivial lives of the soldiers stationed at Outpost 37. As the movie puts it, “This is the story of the men fighting a war the world has chosen to forget.” Unfortunately, the men mentioned there (and, by extension, the movie that surrounds them) is just as forgettable as the war. More of the grey, ill-defined “heavies” would be a blessing compared to what’s actually delivered.

The Blomkamp documentary format is a lot of what’s wrong with the film on a structural level, as it tends to tell instead of show (like showing more aliens for instance). However, its main fault is that none of its ideas are well-developed enough to be memorable. The only moment that suggests an intricate exploration of its world is when a soldier is temporarily paralyzed by a bite from a “numb bug”, an invasive species of insect that infested Earth after hitching a ride here with the “heavies”. More original ideas specific to this world like the numb bugs would be appreciated, but are few & far between. The film instead focuses on far-from-compelling soldier dicks when it should find more of a fascination with the alien beasts that are trying to kill them. There’s nothing particularly new about the soldiers or the heavies compared to other sci-fi action flicks, but at least a movie focusing on the heavies would have a much better chance of being entertaining.

-Brandon Ledet