Alien Outbreak

I wanted this to be a good movie the first time I watched it in 2020, and I watched it again today in hopes that I had been too critical of it the first time I watched it. The aliens are the best aspect of this movie. In fact these are among the best of the best aliens I've ever seen. Whoever is responsible for creating these aliens is a freaking legend. These things creep me out on a whole other level. In most of the shots with the taller beings, I was shocked by how real they look. They are so well made, that it is borderline indiscernible from fact or fiction. If someone showed me some of those alien scenes and told me it was real, I would probably believe them.

Sadly. The acting is terrible. The lead actress is by far the worst of the bunch. Her body language does not mesh with her emotions at all. She's very disconnected and bizarre, and the other characters are pretty bad as well.

The script is terrible, plot is terrible, dialogue is terrible, character interaction is terrible. The constant attempts to save the other characters long after they reached the point of no return is beyond annoying. Enough of your morality nonsense.

Also the high strangeness and mysterious nature of these beings is also amazing. I am truly creeped out by them.

Also, someone should have told them that when you shoot a gun, there is recoil. Standing there still as a rock while supposedly shooting high powered rifles... horrible. Even paintball and air guns have a recoil. Too bad.

As I sat down in 2021 to watch the 2020 UK sci-fi movie "Alien Outbreak", I must admit that I wasn't really expecting anything overly grand, given the movie's fairly low rating. And truth be told, I am not one that is usually overly keen on the sci-fi genre to begin with.

But I hadn't already seen "Alien Outbreak", so of course I sat down to watch it as I had the opportunity to do so.

And I must say that writer and director Neil Rowe actually managed to come up with a movie that wasn't all that shabby. Yeah, I found "Alien Outbreak" to actually be surprisingly watchable and a fair enough movie.

Sure, this wasn't a stellar sci-fi movie. It does bear witness of being a movie that has that low budget feel to it. But at the same time, then the CGI and special effects team actually managed to do well enough to bring the aliens to life on the screen.

"Alien Outbreak" does, however, suffer from being a rather mundane and slow paced movie. The storyline is just not packing enough punch, and it made for a rather mundane experience in terms of entertainment and pacing. While the movie was watchable, it was hardly an outstanding sci-fi movie, nor was it a movie that warrants more than just a single viewing, as the storyline just doesn't have the contents for that.

The acting in the movie was adequate. It wasn't performances that will leave you bedazzled or knock you back in your seat. People were doing fair enough jobs with their roles and characters, but they were struggling against a flaccid and uneventful storyline.

As for the ending of the movie, well... While writer and director Neil Rowe does leave the ending up for audience interpretation, I can't claim that it was an ending that I was overly much a fan of. It just simply left me with an unanswered question, which made me feel like I had essentially just wasted my entire time sitting through the movie, only to be served an ending such as that.

All in all, then "Alien Outbreak" was watchable, but it just slumped in on itself given its slow pacing and rather uneventful storyline. As such, I am rating Neil Rowe's 2020 movie a mediocre five out of ten stars.

I am in no way connected to this movie, just a fan of scifi that loves finding hidden gems online.

The special effects are good to excellent for this type of movie. The acting of the supporting characters is doable but Sgt Zoe keeps waking you up from the illusion.

I think the actress has a wider range than what she shows but I've seen more emotion from the animated rug in Aladin than her. Maybe it was intentional, being coached to act "in shock" but the writing certainly didn't help. At no point do you believe she is a trained police officer,let alone the highest ranking one in the area. The writer has her throw out police procedure from almost the very beginning and every other decisions she makes is a facepalm moment. Certain story arcs go nowhere or add nothing to the story. The bit with the armed units arriving was extremely bad and I think the last person they meet was only in there to get to a 84 min runtime.

I know a lot of people did their best for this movie so I gave it 4 stars but Neil (writer&director) you have to do better. Give it a go if you really want to watch it but you have been warned, this is for hardcore fans of the genre.

In fact probably one of the better indie b movies for aliens. CGI was good, twist was good... but that is pretty much the end of the good and must be where all of the budget went. acting sub par but kept me interested.

4.9

...if you believe any of the praise that is here on this page. Poor casting, acting, writing and remedial CGI, but at least there's little of it.