I had heard good things about this, but I somehow had a very different idea of what it would be like. Now that I look into it, I was confusing it with District 9, which I still haven’t seen.
This isn’t terrible, but it’s not quite there. It’s shot well, the budget was clearly enough for what they were doing. It develops a great landscape. It reminds me of Apocalypse Now. But…
It took a long time to grab my attention, and what did it was the image of the new map of this continent. Even after that sucked me in, the movie feels like it does everything it can to let the viewer go again. We get lots of compelling images, but very little information to give meaning to those images.
There are a few bits and pieces given about the nature of the aliens. But we never really learn what the military does to them. We don’t learn much of anything about why the aliens are here, or why they remain. These are the ideas that would draw me in, and make me a bigger fan of this. As it is, it’s a a sci-fi premise in search of a purpose.
I just took a look at Ebert’s review. He gave it a very positive review, but I really don’t see the insight that he feels the movie had. The reveal at the end seemed like an obvious thing.
Spoilers!
The aliens aren’t exactly antagonistic. They just kind of move around, interact with each other, glow, and don’t care much about humans. This is not a surprise to me. Even though the movie tries to push the idea that the aliens are dangerous or evil or something, there was never any reason to believe it. The military has been attacking them, but without much information given, there’s no real reason to have any feelings about that. We don’t know if they are simply there to prevent the aliens from tainting the rest of Earth’s ecosystem.
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