Kicking off a mini "alien abduction" festival we have Close Encounters of the Third Kind. This is a classic tale of a man who sees a UFO one night and finds his life changed forever. It is a true classic of the genre, one of the set of films that marked the young Spielberg out as one of the leading film makers of our time. Simply a masterpiece.
Intruders
Broadcast as a two parter, this is the tale of... you guessed it, people being abducted by UFOs. Where Close Encounters has remained a powerful film filled with classic moments, however, Intruders is rather painfully what it is - a made for TV piece that takes a 90 minute story and pads it into 160 minutes. It looks cheap, it feels cheap, and after all that it gives us an ending that just kind of flops out and lies there. Not worth watching.
Dark Skies
Continuing our theme of alien abduction we have Dark Skies. Of course, by this point the story is becoming a little 'same old' to us - a family finds themselves the target of alien beings who subject them to a series of increasingly intrusive visitations. But the interest - or lack of - is in how the story is carried out, and in this respect Dark Skies is surprisingly effective. It's certainly not a great film, but it does succeed in building a sense of sympathy and sorrow for the family, and it does manage to give us exposition about the aliens whilst maintaining the sense of mystery about them. Ultimately, the biggest success of the film is that it manages to keep the aliens and their intentions ominous enough that they feel dangerous, and the family sympathetic enough that you really do want them to overcome this.
Signs
Not quite an alien abduction movie, but we threw it in for a look-see anyway!
Signs is a strange movie. There is a lot to commend about it, but it's also a very flawed film. Frankly, most of the issues stem from the fact that it comprises two completely different and largely incompatible films crammed awkwardly into one another.
Signs is a film about faith, specifically about religious faith. It is about the idea that life unfolds according to a plan, that there is a power looking out for us. Mel Gibson is a man who once believed that... until the various pains and difficulties he experienced became too much for him, and he lost his faith. And slowly, the film brings this man to a point where every bad thing in his life converges to give him one perfect moment... one sign that he is indeed in the hands of his God. It's a powerful message if you believe in that kind of thing, and it's certainly a powerful and skilfully done climax whether you believe or not.
But Signs is also a science fiction movie. Science fiction fans are not at all immune to messages of faith and religion... but when they're looking at science fiction, a lot of them tend to focus on the "science" aspect of that. When they see an alien race they want to be enthralled with how it has evolved, how it thinks, what ways it is different, what ways it is the same, why it comes into conflict with us, how the conflict can be resolved. Signs isn't really interested in any of that... indeed, Signs doesn't really know HOW to do any of that. So we're left with an alien menace that is fatally vulnerable to water, but invades, stark naked, a planet that is 70% covered in the stuff - seriously, these are people that you could mount a perfect defence against if you had a few lawn sprinklers around your house! It's nonsensical, frankly. So you have this weird effect where there is half a film that actually has something interesting to say, and does it well... but it's constantly intertwined with utter nonsense. In the end, the film is still worth watching. But only just.
Upside Down
So imagine there were two worlds, lying in such proximity to one another that the surface of one was only a few thousand feet above the surface of the other. Gravity on each world only acts on the things from that world, and anything from one planet which is taken to another will soon heat to burning point.
That's the premise of this movie, which honestly is just plain weird. It's a fantasy - nothing about it makes a jot of sense in terms of real science, but thankfully the movie never tries to pretend otherwise. It simply presents the situation and then uses it as a backdrop to tell a "star-crossed lovers" tale. Unfortunately, none of it really works all that well. The visuals are fascinating in their way, but the characters are mostly flat, the story is just kind of silly, and all in all it's just a bit of fuss about very little.
A Good Day To Die Hard
Well, yet another die hard movie. By this time you have to think that the terrorists of the world just have it in for this poor guy... although really not, as they never are actually terrorists, just big time thieves using terrorism as a front. It's big, it's loud, it's overly silly and preposterous in the extreme. But it's fun enough to watch. If you liked the others, you'll probably like this one.
And the bad guys have a compound that neuralises radiation. This is impossible! You cannot just neutralise radiation! And if you could, that one invention would be worth far more than the stuff they are trying to steal during the course of the film. This annoyed me intensely.
Piranhaconda
Well, another of those horrid low budget monster movies whose only value is in laughing at them. This one is absolutely bog-standard for the type. It isn't really comically bad, it's just plain bad. Some funny/silly moments here and there, and plenty of eye candy for the guys, but otherwise it's just another generic giant snake monster movie. Ho hum.
Sharknado
A giant storm has driven a massive crowd of sharks before it, and now spun off tornadoes that have carried these sharks over land in that most terrifying of all nature's events - the Sharknado!
Another Asylum "masterpiece", Sharknado threatened to be another "Mega Shark Versus Giant Octopus", a movie so absurd that it became a hit comedy. The Asylum has been desperately trying to recapture that vibe ever since, and Sharknado caught a lot of hype on that front, even peeking into the mainstream press. Alas, it's just not that film. It's bad, yes, but it's just plain bad. Not funny bad, just boring bad.
The Big Wedding
Don and Ellie were once married and have two children, Lyla and Jared. They adopted a boy from Colombia, Alejandro. Eventually they divorce, Ellie moves away and Don hooks up with Bebe, Ellie's best friend. When Alejandro is about to get married, he informs Don And Ellie that he never told his natural mother, who is a very traditional Catholic, that they got divorced. And she is coming for the wedding so he asks them if they can pretend to still be married.
Big Wedding isn't a terrible film, really, but it is a seriously mediocre one. It's a farcical comedy in which the farcical elements just aren't all that farcical... there is humour there, and once or twice you'll laugh, but most of the humour will provoke a smile at most, and a lot of it just leaves you thinking "is that it?" Typical is the scene in which Robert De Niro's character awkwardly makes his way out to sit at the end of a diving board over a swimming pool during a party. They play this out for several minutes, and the big payoff of the scene is... that he falls in. And that's it, that's literally the entire comedy payoff for all that setup. And most of the humour in the film is like that.
The Lifeguard
Fed up with her life, Leigh quits New York to return to stay with her parents for a while. She takes up her old job as a lifeguard at the local swimming pool and settles back into a simpler life, apparently content to stay there. But things become more complicated when she strikes up a friendship with a troubled teenage boy... a friendship that becomes too close.
Nothing much to this one, really. It can be summed up by the "first world problems" meme - Leigh isn't happy, so she just wanders off home and regresses to her teenage years. And that's really all there is to the film. She gets involved in a sexual relationship with an under-aged boy... technically, she's raping this kid. But of course she's a woman and he's a guy, so whilst that idea is discussed a little it's ultimately just abandoned when his father takes the "good for him, that's my boy!" attitude.
Olympus Has Fallen
The plot? Well it can be summed up in six words : Die Hard in the White House. So we get the hero with a troubled past, a secret service agent who failed his President. We get thoroughly implausible North Korean terrorists who manage to capture the White House, the President, his kid, and several of the cabinet. And of course we get our secret service agent running around offing terrorists left and right and saving the day.
It's all absurd and ridiculous nonsense, but it does at least have the sense that it's having a bit of fun about the whole thing. The biggest weakness is the last act, which apparently decided that merely having the White House and the President on the line wasn't enough - no, we have to put the entire existence of the US of A on the line!
The Colony
Set in a future in which the whole world has been covered in snow, reducing mankind to a series of isolated colonies hanging on to survival by their fingernails. One such Colony gets a radio distress call from another, and a small party set out to investigate. What they discover is a horror that threatens doom for them all.
There's really very little good about this film. It's not terrible, really, but it's so cliche and unoriginal that it's hard to enjoy it. The premise makes so little sense - one day it started snowing, apparently everywhere, and it just never stopped. There are a series of gigantic weather control machines all over the place, and if one could just be repaired it could help save the Colony! Only... if people built these giant weather control machines in the first place, why did the world end up covered in snow? There's simply no answer given to questions like this, even though the whole resolution of the film depends on it.
And the enemy... well, spoilers! It's just a bunch of guys who have taken to cannibalism. And that's about it, that's all the film really has to offer.
In short, it's dull, it's uninteresting, and just this side of unwatchable.
Oblivion
In the future, the Earth was attacked by an alien menace known as the Scavs. The attack was defeated, but at tremendous cost - the moon was destroyed, and as a result of that and the fighting Earth's environment was catastrophically damaged. The survivors have all moved to a new habitat on Titan, leaving only a few scattered forces on Earth to tend the machines which are gathering up the last of Earth's resources. Their main task is to repair the defence drones that protect the machines from the few surviving Scavs on the planet.
But technician Jack is having doubts about his mission, and as the movie unfolds he gradually discovers that the truth is far more than he has been told.
Oblivion is a good film, well made, well acted, full of cool gadgets - a particular favourite are the horribly menacing weapon drones, which are so cool that Mistress wants one as a pet (She intends to call it 'Squishy').
On the down side, there's really very little about this film that is at all original. Almost every aspect of it has been done before, often better, to the point where you are literally reminded of some other movie about once every ten minutes or so. It's a good film, but it's just not a great one.
