★½
“Deceptive Advertising department, please.”
“An underground fighter and her estranged father steal a spacecraft to escape a dying Earth, only to face a deadly stowaway who sabotages their life support, forcing them into a fight for survival in the claustrophobic confines of space.” That’s the film I wanted to watch. Unfortunately, it actually occupies only about ten minutes or so, of the hundred for which this runs. The rest is mostly painfully obvious, and not particularly innovative, helpful or even funny, attempts at social satire. It feels like writer-director (as well as cinematographer, editor and producer) Grillo saw Don’t Look Up, and thought, “That was okay, but it needed to be much less subtle, and made on a budget of around forty grand.”
It takes place in a world where tech billionaire Elon Musk Jude Micah (Douglas) is predicting doom, with the moon about to crash into the Earth. For the low, low price of fifteen million dollars, you too can have your own escape shuttle – the Intruder of the title – and fly off to join the other emigrants in an outer-space sanctuary. After initial denials from the authorities, turns out Micah is completely correct. Eventually (and we’re talking forty minutes in), we get to the point where Bree Hewitt (Godfrey), the fighter mentioned in the synopsis, does indeed hijack an Intruder and head off-planet. After odd occurrences on-board, there is a brief period, as noted of maybe ten minutes, where she does indeed fight the stowaway (Scarola). Then, it’s back to the social satire.
I suppose, had I gone in with accurate expectations, this might have merited a better rating. There are a couple of moments which actually did amuse me: there’s a faux version of Frank Sinatra, singing a song whose lyrics are basically a serial killer ballad. And the final scene, just before the moon does indeed crash into the Earth, where a TV presenter professes his love for an increasingly horrified colleague. Those were genuinely clever and well-executed. But after the opening cage fight, showing Bree in action – and getting tossed from a pro career because of her failure to stop at the bell – we have to wait almost an hour for her to swing another fist in anger. Which is the reason I was watching.
The reality is, had I gone in with accurate expectations, I simply wouldn’t have gone in at all. I have no objection to films with messages, but this is a prime example of one where it feels the movie is a delivery mechanism for the message, rather then first and foremost being concerned with entertaining the viewers. As soon as I realized this, I tuned out, because – agreement or otherwise with the specific message aside – it’s simply not why I watch films in general, and action heroine movies in particular. If I want a clumsy and blatant lecture on social issues, I will… Oh, wait. I don’t. At all.
Dir: Christian Jude Grillo
Star: Dana Godfrey, Iryna Scarola, D.C. Douglas, Andrew Hunsicker