BEFORE: The title of this alien invasion movie is very similar to that film about Winston Churchill that Gary Oldman won an Oscar for a few years ago, but this film actually came out first, back in 2011. I recorded this on my DVR about three years ago, and it's taking up too much space, it's got to go.
But wait, do you want to guess which movie my DVR really recorded? According to the cable guide and the movie listing on my DVR, it was supposed to record the 2011 sci-fi film "The Darkest Hour", but it actually recorded the Gary Oldman film from 2017 - I should have known when the movie recorded was almost two and a half hours long, instead of just 90 minutes. But that means the WRONG film has been taking up space on my DVR for three years. It also means someone at the cable channel is NOT paying attention to which movie they're running, and they get confused when there are two movies with similar names. I went through this before with the 1995 movie "Kicking and Screaming", directed by Noah Baumbach, every time I tried to record it, it turned out to be the 2005 film "Kicking & Screaming" starring Will Ferrell. Will the people who work for Starz and Showtime and Cinemax please start paying attention to which movies they are airing?
Max Minghella carries over from "Babylon", assuming I can find this 2011 sci-fi film streaming somewhere, or at least on the pirate movie site that saved my neck with "The Myth of Fingerprints" last Thanksgiving.
THE PLOT: In Moscow, five young people lead the charge against an alien race that has attacked Earth via our power supply.
AFTER: I'm in luck, this movie was posted on the pirate site I've been using, but I want to point out that I ONLY use the site to watch a movie when it is NOT available on cable, and not streaming on Netflix, Hulu, Amazon Prime, Roku, Tubi, Plex, or Freevee, OK, so I've been known to use it when a film is on iTunes or YouTube for $3.99 and I don't want to pay for it. What's the harm? I'm not going to post the name of the site because I don't want it to get shut down. Look, I know the new Aquaman movie is posted there, but I'm not going to watch it there, because it will be on HBO probably in about a month anyway. Same goes for "The Marvels", as soon as it's on Disney+ I'll work it into the chain, I've got plenty of movies to keep me busy. So I only go to the pirate site in emergencies, when I have to watch a certain movie to keep the chain going, and I can't find it anywhere else.
Also, programming note, I know I could have watched "Barbie" right after "Babylon", the Margot Robbie connection was almost too obvious to ignore - and then "Barbie" could have connected to "Dumb Money" via America Ferrera, and then "Dumb Money" could have brought me to tonight's film, via Olivia Thirlby, obviously. I chose to not do that, however, because I'm not that into the "Barbie" film, I'd just be watching it to see what all the fuss was about, and also I don't have a way to add two more days to January, and I have a destination in mind for February 1. It's going to take three more steps from here, and I only have three more days.
What a weird month it's been, right? And my linking has been like totally next level, connecting a romance film with an all-Norwegian cast to a World War II drama with a mostly Polish cast, then a horse-racing film with mostly local Welsh actors (and one Aussie), then a Mafia comedy with an all-Italian cast (and that same Aussie) before passing by a UK stop-motion film, a classic romance with an Irish-English cast, and then two films with half-Russian casts, "The Machine" and this one, and they didn't even share any Russian actors? Why do I make things so difficult for myself? The greater the risk, the greater the reward, is that it? (And let's not forget "Tar" and "The Little Mermaid", which both had multi-culti cast members from all over, German and Asian and Hispanic and Eastern European. It's been like the United Nations around here.
Tonight we're back in Moscow on a trip with two young software engineers, who arrive to find their Swedish business partner has given their pitch to the city for a software app for them and cut them out of the deal. Oh, well, live and learn, might as well hang around for a few days, catch whatever nightlife Russia has to offer, meet some girls and wait for the aliens to attack. Wait, what? Talk about a travel nightmare, the two men, the two women they met AND the guy who stole their business idea end up barricaded in the nightclub's prep kitchen for a week, thankfully there was enough food down there to sustain them. When they emerge they find that the city is nearly deserted, the aliens have killed, eaten or disintegrated nearly everyone, and unless they can figure out how to hide in plain sight, they'll be next.
Fortunately, these guys are super-nerds, like, aren't all software engineers super nerdy? So they figure out that these floating alien balls of light don't have eyes, so they must be "seeing" by using electricity, and if they can hide behind glass or solid non-metal objects, the aliens can't see or sense them. This at least gives them a chance to learn if there are any other survivors out there, and when they see a light on in a nearby apartment complex, they head for it. Except the jerk-off business man who stole their idea doesn't make it, the aliens get him, but he totally deserved it, we didn't like him, anyway.
The now-foursome meets a Russian who's turned his apartment into a Faraday cave, because it keeps the aliens from finding him. He's also built a microwave gun that he thinks will disrupt the aliens so they can then be harmed, also if they find any leftover food along the way in abandoned apartments, the gun's also great at warming it up. Together the four wayward Americans make their way to a group of Russian amateur militia, who are holed up in a library (I think, based on the big card catalog in the background) and they share information about the submarine that's coming to town in a few days to rescue any survivors, the location's being broadcast on all the Russian radio stations, also the message is #1 on Russian Top 40.
So it's another team-up to get across the city in time for the submarine pick-up, but essentially this alien invasion film just follows the same formula as "The War of the Worlds", or "Independence Day" or, well, all of them. The aliens invade, they kill thousands of people, but a few survivors band together to find out what the aliens' weakness is, and then, by golly, we've got a chance at taking our world back. It might have been more interesting if I hadn't seen nearly the exact same scenario play out in "Captive State", "District 9" and so many others. It's too bad, we never really find out WHY the aliens invaded, like do they want our water, or our food, or our women? Maybe they're here for our movies! Nah, they probably just want to eat our women.
This was probably made during that brief period where the U.S. had good relations with Russia, namely after the Soviet Union collapsed, but before Putin took charge and turned it into the Evil Empire again. Those were the days, right?
Also starring Emile Hirsch (last seen in "Once Upon a Time in Hollywood"), Olivia Thirlby (last seen in "Just Before I Go"), Rachael Taylor (last seen in "Finding Steve McQueen"), Joel Kinnaman (last seen in "The Informer"), Veronika Vernadskaya, Dato Bakhtadze (last seen in "Ben-Hur" (2016)), Gosha Kutsenko, NIkolay Efremov, Georgiy Gromov, Artur Smolyaninov, Anna Rudakova, Pyotr Fyodorov, Alya Nikulina, Igor Nesvetaev, Mariya Romanova, Irina Antonenko, Sergey Kroshkin.
RATING: 4 out of 10 upscale stores in the Moscow mall
No comments:
Post a Comment