BEFORE: I'm at the last movie for November, since I'm working tomorrow - now I just have to watch 10 more movies in December, and the year will be done. It's going to be tight, but I know I can do it. First here are the format stats for this month, then I can start preparing for the last month:
6 Movies watched on cable (saved to DVD): September 5, 18 1/2, The Life Before Her Eyes, Sing Sing, No Pay Nudity, Save Yourselves!
1 watched on Netflix: Nimona
2 watched on Amazon Prime: Sound of Metal, Encounter
1 watched on Hulu: Alien: Romulus
1 watched on Hulu: Alien: Romulus
10 TOTAL
It's been a week, in addition to working at two basketball games, we had Thanksgiving and also a cat that was in the hospital, and the outcome was, well, not good. Also I had to get my driver's license renewed and that meant going back to the block I used to work on, which was also fraught with trauma. The less said about this week, the better, except for that big meal on Thursday.
I didn't have a Thanksgiving film this year, or a Black Friday film, nothing really felt right. There are films on my list titled "Thanksgiving" and "Black Friday" but they are horror movies, and both therefore somewhat seasonally inappropriate. Plus I didn't have the proper linking to get to either one, so there's that. It's OK, the chain does not require me to observe every single holiday with a movie - I'm about to more than make up for it by doubling down on Christmas movies. Ben Sinclair carries over from "No Pay, Nudity".
THE PLOT: A young Brooklyn couple head to an upstate cabin to unplug from their phones and reconnect with each other. Blissfully unaware of their surroundings, they are left to their own devices as the planet falls under attack.
AFTER: I'm going to try to be a little lenient tonight, even though I have a few issues with the storytelling here, because, you know, it's the holidays and all that and I'm supposed to be generous. Can I overlook a film about an alien invasion where all of the special effects were done extremely on the cheap? If anything the aliens here call to mind the Tribbles from the old "Star Trek" series, just a little bigger, and we all know that the 1960's series had almost no budget, and there was no such thing as CGI, and (spoiler alert) the Tribbles were just fuzzy little puppets. Here the aliens are called "pouffes" and could easily be mistaken for footstools or those big Russian fuzzy hats, perhaps.
But I'm getting ahead of myself, and I want to say something positive here, so this film really NAILED the younger generation, the Brooklyn hipsters who try to be socially conscious but also can't shut up about it, like voting for a Socialist mayor and saying how much they would love to be vegan again, or how they would totally donate to all kinds of charities if only they had any extra money, and then posting about all of this over and over on their socials. GEEZus, can't you do anything without alerting the whole world about how "importent" it is to have moral values and do the right thing, so how come I never see any of you giving up your seat on the subway for an older person, or even paying for that fare, because you jumped the turnstile, didn't you? What a bunch of hypocrites. It's great that you learned to bake during the pandemic, but you eat all that terrible bread yourself, I don't see you baking en masse to feed hungry people, do I?
The point of this film is that man has often thought, throughout history, that he (collectively) is at the center of the Universe. God created Earth and put it smack dab in the middle of everything, the sun revolves around the Earth and so does the moon, obviously, because man is special, the only thinking creature, caretaker of all the plants and animals, especially the tasty ones. And so we enslaved several species to serve as food sources, chickens, cows and pigs especially, because we're somehow "better" than them, also God said so, right here in this book that men wrote about what God said back before anybody could check on it. Well, bad news, the sun does not revolve around the Earth, the opposite is true, but then the whole solar system moves around the galaxy and the galaxy moves around the universe, so we are at the center of nothing. If the universe is infinite than there is no center, and even if it's finite, we're unlikely to be in the center of that. Deal with it.
But time and again, we keep making the same mistake, even once we learned about other solar systems and other galaxies it still seemed like ours was at the center, because everything seems to be getting further away from us - which makes sense if you consider that the universe might still be getting bigger. Imagine a bucket of popcorn that you throw up into the air - every kernel is probably moving further away from each other, because of the energy you imparted when you tossed them all in the air, but the moving pile of popcorn is big and getting bigger, and the chance of any one kernel being in the exact center is very, very small. Yes, there's a center somewhere but who can possibly measure it while it's in motion and constantly expanding. Yes, eventually that popcorn is all going to fall on the floor, and eventually our universe might expend all its energy and start contracting again, but the good news is that we've got some time yet, that could take millions of years.
In the same way, today's entitled youth population all think that THEY are the center of the universe, because suddenly they're all social media influencers and amateur movie stars, and their life choices are very important - TO THEM. Sure, everyone's choices and experiences are important TO THEM, but for the most part throughout history nobody else gave a crap, except for kings and warriors and certain authors. Then we got movies and TV and now social media, suddenly everyone's a star and everyone feels important, really all those likes and follows have been encouraging in all the wrong ways, because the kids are super-entitled now and that nothing should ever go wrong for them and well, we're all doomed now, aren't we? Because we've created a generation that's constantly yapping about how somebody should fix things, and then they're not doing what they should be, which is fixing things. If people devoted just a small fraction of the time they spend complaining about things to working on fixing them instead, I think I'd be a little more hopeful.
Anyway, this couple, Jack and Surina, come to decide that doom-scrolling and brain rot have taken over their lives (I doubt any actual Brooklyn hipsters are this self-aware, though) so they take up a friend's offer to stay at his family's cabin in upstate New York, during which they will turn off their phones and computers, not check their e-mails, and try to re-connect with each other. Su couldn't resist finding a checklist of talking points on the internet before leaving, which kind of feels like a violation of the rules, even if she did write them down by hand. Sure, I'm a bit impressed that any of the youngs still know how to write with paper and pen, but really, she only did it because their printer was broken. Huh, why didn't she just take a photo of the screen, then? Oh, right, no phones for a week, so she wouldn't have been able to access the photo. Kiddoes, we live in an age of marvels, let me tell you about when I was a teenager and young adult and we didn't have the internet, smart phones or streaming video or audio. We had to watch VHS tapes, listen to cassettes or 8-tracks, and if you wanted to take a photo of something you had to use FILM and then wait for a week while the drugstore developed it. Unless you had a Polaroid, of course, which took only a minute or two, but come on, it took crappy photos. We had to FAX things to each other, and then when they were received on the other end, somebody had to photocopy the faxes, one page at a time, just to get it on paper that didn't turn black in sunlight or fall apart or curl up uncontrollably. It was a dark time, sure, but we didn't know things could be any other way. If you wanted to book a table at a restaurant, you had to CALL THEM on a rotary phone, or worse, travel there to talk to someone and then come back at dinner time.
OK, enough about the Dark Ages. Let's get back to Jack and Su. Of course, according to the W.C.P.G.W.? principle, they've unknowingly picked the WORST week to not watch the news or get text messages from friends and family. Did you ever go on vacation outside the country and then have to catch up on the U.S. news when you got back? This is the ultimate scenario of that, because this is the week that aliens have reached Earth to... well, we'll get to that in a minute. At first the aliens are very destructive - after they encounter this weird poofy "animal" they decide to turn their phones back on and learn that certain cities have been destroyed, others have been evacuated, and some of their friends are dead. There's quite a bit of filmmaking cheating here, of course, because seeing all that happening, even in news footage, would take some money to depict, while hearing voicemail messages from relatives and friends about what's happening is darn close to free.
But the aliens are upstate, too, so Jack and Su need to decide what they're going to do. They can't defend themselves properly because they're not "gun people", Jack in fact admits he's pretty terrible at doing "man stuff" which includes fishing and hunting and self-defense. So it seems their best bet is just to drive away from the cabin with enough supplies to live in the woods for a few weeks until they can find out more and decide what to do next. They know that the aliens consume ethanol in all its various forms, but they don't know anything else about how the creatures function or what their intention is, which of course is all a little too inconvenient. Keeping this a mystery of sorts also means that a screenwriter didn't have to determine this.
They witness an alien killing a couple with a gun - but are the aliens truly bloodthirsty or was one just defending itself? To learn what the filmmakers intended here, you kind of have to read between the lines - in earlier scenes Jack had mentioned wanting to learn how to trap a rabbit. Not to kill it, just to be able to trap it would show that he had some skill. At another point, Su is fascinated by a line of ants in the forest, working together to collect bread crumbs, while unaware that they're being watched by relatively giant humans who could crush them easily. Well, the somewhat clunky analogy here is that the humans are the ants, being watched by the aliens who could easily destroy them. It could be that the aliens are here to destroy our planet, but also they could be here to save it, as we've done a pretty horrible job of maintaining it. Maybe we don't deserve it, then, and some other race needs to teach us or chastise us or destroy us in order to save the planet.
The whole thing is rather ambiguous here, especially the ending. Jack and Su are easily trapped (like the rabbit) with the promise of a wi-fi signal. Ooh, pretty clever, aliens. But then we don't know what their fate will be - did the aliens trap them to kill them, or to eat them, or just to keep them safe while they clean up all the oil spills and nuclear waste? Will Jack and Su end up in some intergalactic zoo (or "ant farm"), because that could be flippin' sweet, or will they be enslaved and sent to go mine salt or spice or diamonds on some faraway planet? That's up to you, I guess, because the movie couldn't seem to decide, so it just kind of ends, which is way too abrupt. Well, maybe that's the way our society should end, not with a bang but a credits scroll. Again, trying to be nice here and not harp on some serious narrative problems.
Directed by Alex Huston Fischer & Eleanor Wilson
Also starring Sunita Mani (last seen in "You Hurt My Feelings"), John Reynolds (last seen in "Horse Girl"), John Early (last heard in "DC League of Super-Pets"), Jo Firestone (last seen in "Together Together"), Gary Richardson (last seen in "Don't Think Twice"), Johanna Day (last seen in "Worth"), Stephen Koepfer and the voices of Amy Sedaris (last seen in "Jennifer's Body"), Zenobia Shroff (last seen in "The Marvels")
RATING: 6 out of 10 pieces of chopped firewood
