BEFORE: All right, let's get on with the second third of this year's movies. I'm going to sort my list today on the IMDB app, so the films coming up are at the top, and I'm going to file away the DVDs from the last month and also grab the DVDs for the next month so they'll be handy. Sure it's a lot of work, but I only have to do it about once a month, and then I don't have to search for things every night. 9 or 10 films are on the DVR, ready and waiting, and then another 10 or so are waiting on streaming platforms, so there's really a need to keep this all organized, all so I can dive right in with a movie each night and not spend 15 minutes searching for it - of course, the movies are changing platforms all the time, so occasionally there's no getting around it, that movie is NOT where I left it, and I have to then find another way to watch it. This time I appear to have "lost" a movie somehow, it's underlined on my list, which means I HAVE IT, either on a DVD or a DVR, but now it doesn't seem to be in either place. I think it's still running on cable, but I'd better be sure. I may have scheduled it to record on the DVR, and then maybe the cable was out or re-booting that day and it didn't record? I don't need it for another 2 weeks so at least there's time to fix this, which is why I pre-check the scheduled films after each milestone holiday.
John Boyega carries over from "The Woman King". I made a little bit of headway into the time-travel section of the list by watching "See You Yesterday", and now I've almost cleared the alien invasion section by watching today's film, along with the one I watched in January. There's just two of those left now, but they're damn hard to link to. And in a couple weeks I can pick up the "dystopia/apocalypse" films again, that's another tricky topic.
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Darkest Hour" (Movie #4,630)
THE PLOT: A teen gang in South London defend their block from an alien invasion.
AFTER: OK, so it's not exactly "Hamlet", but perhaps it doesn't have to be, it can just be what it is, a film about aliens landing (the hard way) and coming into contact with a group of street kids. Look, when the aliens come they're not going to know our ways, so them landing on the White House lawn or at Buckingham Palace is very unlikely, they could just as easily land in the middle of the desert, but a city is much better, because after their long trip, those aliens are gonna be hungry.
Let me go easy, maybe, because this was director Joe Cornish's first film - every film is somebody's first film, maybe - and also actor John Boyega's. It also feels like the filmmakers went out of their way to try to duplicate how teens talk and how they might react to a real alien invasion, like what weapons they might use to fight back and how they'd avoid being eaten. And they thought pretty hard about what these aliens should look like, and how they would move, and how scary would it be if they didn't have eyes, for example. So in one way it's also a pre-cursor to "A Quiet Place", another invasion film where the aliens are deadly, but also not built anything like humans, so it takes a while to understand how they function, and therefore how they can maybe be defeated. Also a bit like "Stranger Things", only with British teens, but this film came first.
Clever to set the invasion during Guy Fawkes Night, which is a time that Brits set off a lot of fireworks, akin to our Independence Day (only what do Brits know about independence, am I right?) Who's going to notice aliens falling to earth when there are fireworks going off all over the place, explosions everywhere and the sky already being lit up? Does this imply that the aliens were smart, or did they just get very lucky? I liked some of the concepts here, like the idea that the first alien the teens fought was a female, kind of like a Queen Bee, and all the rest of the aliens were males, who could center in on the Queen by smell. They have no eyes, after all.
But really, the only thing that changes from alien invasion film to alien invasion film is the look of the nasty E.T.'s and the city they're invading. I've seen one group of teens fight floating light aliens that were invading Moscow, and now it's another group of teens fighting bear-gorillas with glow-in-the-dark teeth invading London. It's like the screenwriters are just filling out a big script with blanks in it, like playing "Mad Libs". OK, give me a city, now give me two animals and a weird facial feature... Now pick one character to not make it to the final reel, and we've got ourselves a script!
But this film got a second look years later from sci-fi fans when John Boyega got cast in "Star Wars" and Jodie Whittaker got a role on "Doctor Who", and they realized Nick Frost, who was in "Paul" and "The World's End" and "Shaun of the Dead" also has a role. So this might be worth a look just for those reasons alone - NIck Frost is always fab. He's not in tomorrow's film, sorry, but he'll be back here for two more films in about 10 days.
Also starring Jodie Whittaker (last seen in "One Day"), Alex Esmail, Leeon Jones, Franz Drameh (last seen in "The Gentlemen"), Sammy Williams (ditto), Simon Howard, Nick Frost (last seen in "The Sparks Brothers"), Maggie McCarthy (last seen in "See How They Run"), Danielle Vitalis (last seen in "The Bubble"), Paige Meade, Gina Antwi, Natasha Jonas, Michael Ajao (last seen in "Last Night in Soho"), Luke Treadaway (last seen in "Unbroken"), Flaminia Cinque (last seen in "Leap Year"), Jumayn Hunter (last seen in "Dom Hemingway"), Selom Awadzi, Haneen Hammou, Jacey Salles, Karl Collins (last seen in "The Flash"), Joey Ansah (last seen in "How to Talk to Girls at Parties"), Adam Leese (last seen in "King of Thieves"), Lee Long, Jermaine Smith, Paisley Billings, Frankie Clarence, Chris Wilson (last seen in "Dream Horse") and the voice of Adam Buxton (last heard in "Sing 2").
RATING: 6 out of 10 marijuana plants in Ron's weed room
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