Alien Arrival

This movie may be a good first time effort for the director, but it does almost everything wrong. The story can't decide what it's about, the characters are thinly sketched and inconsistent, the effects from tolerable to embarrassing, and the sets and locations looked almost exactly like a 70s Doctor Who or Star Trek effort. There is sometimes a decent atmosphere and some camera work is effective. But it's the muddled story which often makes no sense, that killed it for me. It's not that is was too complex, it's simply that scenes, and even individual dialog lines, didn't connect to each other in any way.

I think possibly if you watched it slightly drunk and with the sound off, it could seem like an amusing diversion, because of some effective images - mostly skies with planets and ships. But trying to follow it like a proper movie just leads to disappointment.

It's a low budget film and much is what you would expect. Cliches and bad to decent writing. There isn't a ton of dialogue though so it isn't a big sore spot. Acting is okay to good. Effects are okay except the monster scenes.

Where the movie shines is the world it creates. It's a convoluted and messy story but enjoyable by the end. After the film I had to look up if this was an original story. It seemed like the setup for a comic book or something. Couldn't find anything so I was impressed.

The synopsis here is that Kye Cortland (Dan Mor) is escaped from a planetary prison by some guerrilla types who are the enemy of the Empire and sent on a mission on a ship called 'Arrowhead' as he has the technical skills to fly it. The mission goes a tad wrong and he gets shipwrecked on a deserted moon.

There is a tradition that certain prisoners are executed on a particular day each year and Kye finds out his father is next. All he wants to do is get to him before that happens and these outlaws are his only chance. The problem is he is not alone on this moon and what he meets will change him forever.

Now this is low budget but that made me like it even more. They have gone back to basics and used bits of old vacuum cleaners and typewriters to make some of the props – even dustbin lids are employed. The acting is all excellent. Dan Mor is particularly good, but I have to say hats off to Christopher Kirby who starred in the brilliant 'Iron Sky'. He only has a small role but absolutely nails it and then some. The on board computer is brilliant too and will remind certain people of 'Dark Star' or even 'Red Dwarf'. The story itself is refreshingly original and it manages to keep the tension going right the way to the final frame. The CGI varies from rather good to above average but I am more than happy to live with that when the over all package is actually engagingly good.

Of course I had never heard about this 2016 sci-fi movie titled "Arrowhead", from writer and director Jesse O'Brien, prior to sitting down and watching it here in 2025. Normally, then sci-fi is not my go-to genre for entertainment. But I will watch the occasional sci-fi movie now and again. And without knowing what I was in for here, I suppose writer and director Jesse O'Brien had every opportunity to entertain and impress me.

However, I found the script and storyline to be somewhat dull. It was a slow paced narrative, and there wasn't really much of anything interesting happening, and that made it quite an ordeal and a struggle to sit through 98 minutes of this.

I was not familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list, and that actually spoke in favor of the movie, as I enjoy watching new and unfamiliar talents on the screen. I will say that the acting performances in "Arrowhead" were good.

Visually then the movie was actually good. Not jaw-droppingly impressive or anything, but good.

"Arrowhead" is a movie that will appeal way more to fans of the sci-fi genre, way more than it did to me as a casual viewer.

My rating of writer and director Jesse O'Brien's 2016 movie "Arrowhead" lands on a four out of ten stars.

This is a sincere effort, not a piece of schlock (which is how it earned its fourth star from me), and does quite well with its budget, and the acting is reasonable (I especially liked Shaun Micallef's voice work as the shuttle's AI system, RE3F (pronounced "reef")). The problem is that while the film throws a fair number of potentially interesting ideas at the wall, it thinks that more of them stick than actually do, and if the exact rules of how one of the big ones worked were ever made clear it went right by me.

(It's also frustratingly slow-moving at times. At 95 minutes in length, it could have been easily done at 70 to 75.)