One Shot

This movie is a bad sniper movie and an even worse science fiction movie. It looks cheap in all aspects. The CGI looks cheap and makes no sense at all. The bombardment scene in the beginning is a joke (a building collapsing like being demolished by carefully set explosive devices). The animations of vehicles look like SF games from the 90s.

The costumes and weaponry are 90s Earth, on both sides (alien side too!). They did not even try to make them look different. Only the firing sound comes out of a PC and sounds just like that. The effects of bullet hits are erratic, sometimes solid rock explodes, sometimes a helmet face get's cut off as clean as with a laser torch, guy inside totally unharmed. Then suddenly, the "hero" starts running through enemy lines without any cover and takes them all out firing a pistol. Needless to say, that none of them shooting assault rifles hit him seriously, they already spent their luck moments before, cutting down his entire unit without resistance.

The sniping techniques are beginners at best, most of the stuff shown is only show and has no real use. The reticules are fantasy style and use blurry hexagons to make shooting even harder.

The movie has zero story. A few screens showing you beautiful young women try to tell you the basics of what has happened. Humans went to an alien inhabited planet and started a war. The "aliens" look 100% identical to humans (yeah, budget i know) wearing turquoise contact lenses. They speak in a rough makeup language producing metallic and static sounds that make no sense (no, they are not cybernetics). They wear black (evil color) suits and metal helmets that look a bit like a knight's helmet meets Darth Vader.

The whole movie,yes the whole movie, is made up of scenes where the protagonists runs away, hides, sets up to snipe a few of his pursuers, then continues. Ah, and a few scenes on board a mysterious military station in orbit where officers watch and comment his actions but do NOTHING to help him.

Finally he meets the damsel in distress, an alien woman, confronts a fellow human soldier (he must defeat him in close combat obviously) and get's saved by his enemy, the alien sniper because he showed mercy and compassion to the atrocities done to the aliens by humans (his comrades).

The whole movie was an excuse to show someone use a sniper rifle (wrongly).

If you are looking for a science fiction movie, skip it. If you are looking for a sniper movie, look further. Nothing else to be seen here. Overrated Miss Aiden doesn't add anything to the movie, even trying to look good is a pain here.

One can only hope that the director will not raise any further money via Kickstarter to undertake another adventure into the realms of movie making. This movie was not even well-meant. If it was a student's first full movie attempt...no, even then it would disappoint.

My wife and I had finished watching something pretty good on N..F x (yes, that can happen), and she then called it a night while I decided to check out some stupid B (C or D) list action movie. I've sometimes been pleasantly surprised. Although usually not. This movie falls into the not category. Or make that NOT.

I gave it a rating of two only because I only give ones when I'm offended. This wasn't offensive. It was just all the other bad and irritating things a truly bad movie can be: boring, pointless, derivative, fake, cheap, slapdash, cheesy, cliché-ed and ... in the end ... barely having any claim to be either a war movie, or a sci-fi movie. I'm usually offended by attempts to become philosophically deep ... scenes thrown in to drive home some drively political "message". But this movie, while it almost tried, made such a lame attempt at it that it was basically inconsequential to the rest. Almost tried, is a good definition of this entire production. It doesn't even try.

This movie doesn't need a spoiler alert, because the ending is so obvious that even the premise and the description of the first 20 minutes gives away the ending.

Take away the so-called sci-fi touches, this is just an American sniper in -- someone suggested Afghanistan -- but definitely some middle eastern country, battling ISIS or the Taliban. His unit has been wiped out, and now he's alone and the only way to escape is to ... stay where he is and scan the desert region endlessly, and watch the camp of the bad guys, endlessly. If you removed the scenes of him looking through his scope and not seeing much of anything, you'd cut this movie down to an hour. Sometimes, just for whatever (to get a bit of food or water maybe) he goes down and attacks the camp, miraculously killing anyone he comes across. Nothing's believable. He's immortal. He can be in a firefight with 20 bad guys shooting at him with automatic rifles, and he takes them out with karate kicks, a pistol, or a knife. He actually gets captured at one point, that that of course was no problem. A slight diversion, and he's rescued.

Just for the sci-fi dimension, he's supposedly on some planet. For some reason, he's supposed to be a good guy, although you're left wondering how the good guys can be that, when they are the ones who have invaded this planet and the people who are there are "insurgents". There's no attempt to deal with this ambiguity. It's all just boo-rah ... including recuperating your dead.

The sci-fi thing is provided by some 2001 Space Odyseey command ship which, like a spy satellite, can watch the sniper's every move. But they don't do anything up there but comment on how great he is, or how he's in terrible danger all the time, and make plans to save him but never can for reasons that no one bothers to really explain. The actors playing the command ship scenes, which consists of some black painted plywood set, have nothing to say but ... well, there he is, getting into a cave, or there he is, running around, or whatever ... and the commander seems to know everything that is happening, including the sniper's motivations and plans. It's remarkable.

And remarkably lazy ... or just stupid ... writing. Some people call this sort of thing uninspired. But that's a term you'd use for someone who is perhaps capable of being inspired? This is obviously the level of writing you get from someone who is only capable of the most cliché-ed ideas. Nothing is original. And the director really can't do anything with it but throw in some lame fight scenes, long survey-the-desert sequences, and drop a few "alien"/human socio-cultural "exchanges. And there's a really bad guy, actually two ... a bad/bad alien guy who looks like he's straight out of Kabul, and the good/then bad human guy, to I guess show that this whole human adventure on this planet is bad? Or? ... And there's a very sexy alien princess this sniper is suddenly protecting, thrown in, to make sure there's SOME reason for the sniper to seem like a hero.

I get irritated when I see this sort of thing. OK, I get it. This provided work for some people. But ... wow ... what gets me is that these types of Netflix filler fodder aren't put through some sort of quality process. The writer of this thing should never be given any more money, ever, for full length movies. There are probably several hundred other aspiring writers who could have provided something more interesting. Or at least not so laughably cliché-ed.

I am a big fan of scifi movies. Even when they are cheaply made. As long as they have a intelligent made or even just interesting story i am entertained by that. On Shot did not entertain me at all.

There is a sniper who is somehow observed from a military space station using an infrared telescope. Thats the whole scifi part of this movie. This guy does what a sniper does. Lying in the dirt, sniping and running to his next position. After watching for 15 minutes a sniper running through the desert, shooting "aliens" which are just guys with contact lenses and fancy gas masks i started to fast forward. >> More desert >> more sniping >> more guys with contact lenses and gas masks and so on. All non military "Aliens" look very arabic by the way. Maybe because people which live in deserts automatically dress like arabs ... even if they are aliens.

If you cut out the few parts with the space station you could easily retitle the movie to "Afghanistan sniper adventure". Some people would maybe wonder why the Afghans have all blue eyes and what unusual brand of gas mask they are wearing there, but most people would not even notice that it was meant to be a science fiction flick.

This is probably a somehow acceptable sniper movie, but it completely failed at being a science fiction movie.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with wanting to make your own sci-fi action flick. If you have the means, even if not the absolute best of means, then why not? The special effects are actually pretty solid for the most part, though as is often the case, the more they dominate a scene the more unseemly they are. The production design and art direction are nothing special, but suitable such as they are. Action sequences are reasonably well done; all aspects of the technical craft are fine. James Schafer's music is decent in and of itself, though nothing to proverbially write home about.

From there the picture starts to become more suspect. Basically as soon as it begins one can only wonder what genre tropes it will or will not play with. That 'One shot' goes the 'Star Trek' route of making its non-human characters ("Ceruleans") look extremely human, with only scant cosmetic differences, is perhaps extra unfortunate here since the picture doesn't have any other qualities that really leap out. The costume design is but perfunctory, and equally uninspiring generally (blah blah military garb, blah blah civilian clothing). Specifically, a little worse is that from what we see of Cerulean civilians and their sartorial arrangements, and glimpses at their culture, their conception is nothing more than a direly weak, unimaginative, and somewhat dubious and unlearned borrow: "Hey, the Middle East is pretty alien, right? What if the Ceruleans were inspired by the Middle East?"

Meanwhile, I've seen more than a few titles from filmmaker John Lyde at this point, and I know him to be a capable filmmaker within those spaces he chooses for himself. It really seems in 'One shot' as though he's just phoning it in with his direction, cinematography, editing, and production - there's nothing wrong with it, but it's also perfectly unremarkable. More tired still is Adam Abram's screenplay. Characters are as empty as characters can be; dialogue is without exception dull and flat; scene writing is defined by these same traits. Plot is minimal, yet the more we get, the more it's cemented that the movie is doing nothing more than transplanting all the worst facets of "Joe Blow Know It All's vague, unsophisticated, mostly racist ideas of what Middle Eastern culture is" onto the Ceruleans, and all the most self-inflated, bloviating jingoist "Mission Accomplished" military bluster of the modern United States onto the humans in this unspecified future. There are notable themes on hand, but they are approached with no delicacy or care and quickly get lost in the mire.

Between Lyde's unbothered direction here, and even more so Abram's painfully hollow or even questionable writing, the cast have little to work with. They do the best they can, but it's not enough. All the while, 'One shot' fails to elicit a baseline level of interest, let alone thrills or impact. There are some good ideas here; they are misused, and amount to nothing. I didn't have high expectations when I sat to watch, yet still I'm disappointed by how profoundly middling this film is. There are bare-bones fragments of what could have been something good and worthwhile, but think of this as the cinematic equivalent of a leg whose weight-bearing bones have been completely shattered. Apologies to those who did work hard on 'One shot,' only for their contributions to result in something that trips over its own two left feet; commendations to those who watch this and find more value in it than I did. For my part, I simply can't recommend this - there are too many other flicks you could and should be watching instead.

It is so obvious the 'bad Aliens' are supposed to represent Muslims.. the ethnicity of the actors who play the parts of the aliens are of middle-eastern descent or closely resemble Arabs and middle-eastern. The way the female alien and the leader of the aliens are dressed clearly resembles that of tribes men and women. In my opinion whoever made this movie had an agenda... and it was anti-Muslim. Before anyone gets the idea I am Muslim and I am being over sensitive.. think again, I am an atheist and as far as I am concerned all religions are ridiculous. But what is even more ridiculous is someone making such a cringeworthy and obvious piece of anti-Muslim propaganda. To make things worse, it is a dreadful story line, really bad dialogue, poor production quality and badly acted. Watch it and decide for yourself.