BEFORE: Just my luck, this film came on to my watchlist a couple of months ago, by way of Netflix - but I had already watched all of my Adam Driver movies - "White Noise", "Annette" and "The Last Duel" - back in May. I covered him already this year, and I had no intention of circling back, but then I saw I could get here another way, so Chloe Coleman carries over from "Avatar: The Way of Water", and there you go, two sci-fi movies back-to-back. And it's never too late to squeeze another Adam Driver movie into this Movie Year.
THE PLOT: An astronaut crash lands on a mysterious planet only to discover he's not alone.
AFTER: However you feel about this film, and I'll admit it seems a bit schlocky at first, and then when you get into it, late in the game it's very sappy and sentimental, and you can probably guess the ending coming, like a mile away, but trust me, this one could have been SO much worse, and so, therefore by comparing it to how bad it COULD have been, then maybe it's not so bad.
No way around it again tonight - SPOILER ALERT - turn back now if you haven't seen this one, and from the box office back in March, it doesn't look like many people went to see it. Maybe it got a lot of eyeballs on Netflix a few months later, I don't know. I love this 90-day window where movies start streaming just three months after they leave theaters, if we could lock this into place across the board, that would really help me out, studio executives in Hollywood. For the lowbrow films, of course - I understand that films that might get nominated for Oscars, or films whose creators THINK they might get. nominated for Oscars are hesitant to bring things to streaming quickly. But thankfully this is not one of those films, unless it wants to try for some effects consideration, or maybe a nod for best sound editing or whatever.
This film plays on a couple of theories about the universe, which may or may not be true - that's why they're still theories, they really can't be proven or disproved given the lack of evidence we have on some things. The first theory is that we're not alone in the universe - here you have to think about how many stars there are, how many of those have planets circling them that are not too close or not too far away (in the "Goldilocks" zone, like Earth...). Then knowing that the universe has been here for billions and billions of years, what's the likelihood that intelligent life might have developed somewhere else? Carl Sagan had a formula for this many years ago, taking all the variables into consideration, I think he determined that mathematically, at least, other civilizations on other planets WERE possible. They just haven't contacted us yet, maybe they don't like us or maybe they've been looking and they haven't found us, after all the universe is a pretty honkin' big place. Or maybe they've finally received our 1950's TV broadcasts or that terrible record album we put on Voyager 1 and those made them more determined to leave us alone, it's tough to day. (I mean, come on, did it HAVE to be a Carpenters album?)
Or, just maybe, somebody made contact on Earth, but they came at the wrong TIME. Maybe they got a head start on their planet, by a few million years, so they were in their Space Age while we were still trying to lose our prehensile tails and figuring out that lava is hot. So eventually this movie lets slip that it's taking place 65 million years before mankind, which is strange because then they show us Adam Driver on a beach on another planet, Somaris, with his wife and daughter, and he's clearly wearing a cotton Hanes t-shirt. Umm, how is that not a human civilization? He sure looks human, and his daughter is a beautiful bi-racial teen, so that means liberalism existed way back then, and somebody knew about wokeness and mass appeal. They sure don't look like aliens, they look and act and talk like humans.
Well, a couple of things could be happening here in the subtext, which brings me back to how this could have been a worse storyline. If they end it with two people stuck on Earth and they become the equivalent of Adam & Eve and they have to populate this new planet they've discovered, yeah, that would be worse. That's some simple-ass Rod Serling "Twilight Zone" twist ending stuff, it's been done. While it is true that some evolution deniers have created these scenarios where maybe humans came from other planets, and not evolved up from aquatic creatures and then primates, really that just comes from a place where people don't want to imagine that their ancestors were monkeys. But don't we have the fossil records to prove it?
Again, thank God the movie doesn't go there - the lead character spends the whole movie trying to get OFF of ancient Earth, and it would be a darn shame to see him fail and get stuck here. Really, this would be the best time to visit Earth, before man polluted everything and hunted several important animal species to extinction, and used up all the resources to the point where we have to invade Pandora just to get a little unobtanium. 65 millions years before that, nobody even knew where Earth was or how important it could be in the future. There's just one little problem with visiting Earth back then - OK, it's a big problem, called dinosaurs.
So this film could have also gone the "Sound of Thunder" route and just had people with future tech fighting dinos and trying desperately to not step on a butterfly or something, because every action back then would have huge implications for the planet's future, and the evolution of birds, mammals and proto-humans. The film doesn't go this route, either, which was a relief.
However, some things still go very, very wrong. For starters, there's the fact that all of our hero pilot's passengers were in cryostasis, and most didn't survive the crash, so there goes his five-star delivery rating. And the ones that maybe did survive for a bit probably got eaten by T. Rexes. Now he's got to get himself 14 kilometers across some very dangerous terrain with dinosaurs everywhere to find the other half of the ship, to see if the lander vehicle can help him get off the planet. And the timetable gets accelerated when he learns that he's arrived on Earth at simply the WORST possible time. You can probably guess what's about to happen, my wife guessed it on one try without even seeing any of the movie.
There is still the possibility, however, that whatever non-human race is seen in this film DOES populate Earth one day, but they never state this outright, which is fine. But then it does lead to some questions about the extinction-level events that our planet has suffered - what would have happened if the dinosaurs hadn't died out? Was Earth supposed to be a planet where dinos were allowed to evolve, and would they someday have grown more intelligent? If allowed to flourish and eat well and adapt for a few million more years, would the dinosaurs have been able to create tools, form societies and develop language, agriculture, vehicles, etc.? Or was this just never going to happen, I mean, how could a T. Rex work a field with such tiny little arms? Would they have taken in little primate working pets, like humans took in dogs? In that alternate scenario, would I today be a working herding primate on a dinosaur's farm?
Well, I guess we'll never know, because non-human Adam Driver came to Earth and shot a bunch of dinosaurs in self-defense, and then they all died shortly after that. This is our history, damn it, why aren't they teaching this stuff in schools? We're focused on the wrong causes, right now conservatives in the South are banning books from libraries because they believe they promote the gay lifestyle and the liberal agenda, but they should be going after the history books that don't mention other theories about what happened to the dinosaurs. And if not for the meteor, we wouldn't all be here, so clearly it was God's plan to wipe out the dinos because their society had NO religion and didn't recognize Dinosaur Jesus as their personal savior. I mean, this is basic, basic stuff and everybody knows this in their heart to be true, right?
I guess not, because instead we just get this "woke" movie with a heathen non-human fighting dinosaurs with a future laser-gun in the past. Does this all make sense to you? Look, I'll take it because it was very thrilling and everything that COULD go wrong did, which means you'll be at the edge of your seat for the whole film, and it's full of those "The dinosaur's right behind me, right?" moments. And it's not just "Forbidden Planet" meets "Jurassic Park", right? RIGHT?
Also starring Adam Driver ("last seen in "The Last Duel"), Ariana Greenblatt (last seen in "Love and Monsters"), Nika King, and the voice of Brian Dare.
RATING: 7 out of 10 distress calls
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