This is bad movie. It’s dumb, loud, and needlessly long.
The good (?)
“But you said this is a bad movie!“
Every movie has some good in it. Every movie. The creature reveal, and the conclusion to the first chase scene, were legitimately great. The trailers did a good job priming me to be pleasantly surprised here, to be fair. Having only watched the trailer, you could be forgiven for thinking this would basically be A Quiet Place – Korea, right down to the creature design being a ripoff. But the creature reveal – the first one anyway – isn’t that. It will actually make you gasp. Made me, at least.
Everything else
Everything else sucked.
- The first creature reveal, great as it is, takes too long. It happens some forty minutes into the movie, and by that time, the extremely annoying main character has been on the screen forty minutes too long. This part of the movie is basically you watching him try to follow, but always miss, the action. Sometimes by far, sometimes narrowly, but he keeps missing it. God damn it gets old.
- Did I say A Quiet Place? Lol. Quiet, it was not. Some ninety percent of the dialogue in the movie is not spoken – it’s shouted. Loudly. At the top of the characters’ lungs. Every sound feels like punishment after a point. You almost want the aliens – all except one of whom seem infinitely more soft-spoken, more decent, and more civilized than the humans, by the way – to catch these guys and just fucking end it all.
- That same ninety percent, by the way, you could just completely cut out. And you should. It would shorten its bloated length, which it badly needs. Exactly none of what the characters say in these manic states is useful, impactful, or funny. The director seems to mistake shouting for acting, and the entire cast echoes (heh) this. The jokes and lol moments are either misplaced, overstretched, or just plain disgusting. The movie is all over the place tonally, and that stops it from feeling like a cohesive whole. You might’ve seen a lot of wtf-did-I-just-watch kinda reactions to this movie. In addition to the absolutely insane attempt to lore-drop in the last five minutes of the runtime, the discordant tone is a big reason for that.
- Plot inconsistencies. This movie doesn’t know what it wants its aliens to be, and so it tries to make them do everything. They’re humanoid, civilized, and clearly very advanced technologically, and yet, they make no attempt to actually communicate with any humans. Their only mode when people are around seems to be mindless rampaging, and going full ooga-booga with spears and axes and whatnot. What, you don’t have guns aboard your city-sized spaceship? It would be one thing if it were established that the aliens are here on a hunt, or a ritual of some sort that requires primitive weapons, à la Predator. But no. If anything, the little exposition we do get makes it seem like they’re on a super important, high-stakes rescue mission. You’d expect them to bring out all the fucking tech. But no. One of them literally turns into a dog, instead. An alien shitbull of some kind. The fuck?
- In the beginning of the movie, the aliens are apparently killing cattle left and right, savagely so. Not even eating most of their kills. But they don’t touch the horses. The movie never gives an explanation for this. A random character does wonder why they didn’t kill the horses. A pertinent question, seeing as in the rest of the movie the aliens are going to kill a lot of animals and people. But yeah it’s never actually said or explained why never any horses. In all the chases and fight scenes, the horses are unharmed. It feels totally incidental too, which is even weirder. Like, why ask that question if you’re not going to answer it, or even hint at there being an answer at all (show an alien actively avoid harming a horse, for example – never happens). The horses just, seemingly out of sheer dumb luck, come out without a scratch.
- One of the humans is … kind of immortal?
So yeah. Stupid, loud, annoying.
