★★
“Over-stuffed to the point of bloat”
There are some very interesting ideas here. Unfortunately, probably too many of them. As a result, the end-product feels like a half-baked collection of semi-formed thoughts – none of which are explored to the extent they deserve. It begins with an apocalypse, apparently triggered in order to stave off an alien invasion. Fast-forward a few years, and we join Sarah (Hutchinson), one of four children who are shortly to be teleported to a space station orbiting around another planet, which is the target for future habitation, and where the President of Earth now resides. Except an alien sympathizer stages an assassination attempt, leaving the children dropped onto the planet’s surface, along with the Commanfer (Trigo), who had a role in the apocalypse seen earlier. But he ends up being taken over by a parasite which turns him psychotic and he begins hunting down the children. Who need to locate the President, who also crash-landed nearby, because…
Well, I’m still not sure about that. Or about a number of other things here. For the film seems to have the attention span of a goldfish, and ends up like an elevator pitch, hurling concept after concept at you, in the apparent hope that you’ll do the work of arranging them into something coherent and interesting. Because it appears writer-director Bolduc couldn’t be bothered. There’s no shortage of imagination here. Heck, you’ve got enough here for at least a trilogy of films, possibly more, covering territory from The Terminator to David Cronenberg’s They Came From Within. And I genuinely wanted to root for Sarah, a serious-minded and likeable girl, who is thrown in at the deep end, having not only to survive on an alien planet, but also keep the other three from bickering their way to death. While the alien planet looks suspiciously like Earth, the effects are generally decent for the budget, save for one wobbly monster earlier on – and that’s in Sarah’s imagination, so probably deserves a pass.
But you’ll be left with far too many questions for this even to approach acceptability. Why does the terrorist set his bomb with a 15-minute delay? Why does the space station only seem to have a couple of escape pods? How can an alien fish parasite effortlessly infect and control a human host? Why does it want to hunt down the kids? What’s so important about this President? Is there any relevance to Sarah’s bed-ridden mother? How does this all tie together with the pre-apocalypse footage, where the Commander appears to play a key part in triggering Armageddon? There’s an apparently wilful failure to explain what is going on, which grew increasingly wearing on me, over even the relatively brisk 83-minute running time. In this aspect, it reminded me of another recent SF film with a teenage protagonist, Prospect. The two films’ directors should combine forces: maybe they could come up with one decent story between them.
Dir: Drew Bolduc
Star: Shannon Hutchinson, Vito Trigo, Jasmina Parent, Johnathan Newport