Cosmotron42O

I saw this title advertised and came here to check it out. It had like a 6 yesterday. So I got it and watched it. I don't understand where in the world they got the 6 from. Now it's a 4.9. And it had over 1k yesterday. Anyway, if it looks too good to be true it probably is...

So yeah. This has got to be one of the seemingly lowest budget films I've seen in a while. They like rented a mediocre, cheap villa in the English countryside, probably on Airbnb. And they rented 3 cars. And probably advertised on Craigslist for 2 main and 4 supporting actors... or wherever it is you get actors 'off the street' these days. I think the whole thing was shot like over a weekend. Less than a week, tops. They could have believably shot the whole thing in one day, like one of Willis' recent movies.

They went for a documentary style, of sorts, and probably really did use phones for the majority of the footage. I mean the premise was sort of interesting, and probably could have gone somewhere... but the whole thing was just like a high school movie final project that got a b-. That's the overall vibe I got from it. The main characters were annoying as hell. So they are famous social media performers/influencers who steal? Do you know how easy it would be for the police to get them? I'm not going to even... yeah.

The monster in the movie, I've seen middle-schoolers' Halloween costumes that put more effort into the concept and execution than this. And he kept repeating the same chant over and over again. Except it wasn't even chant-y sounding, or creepy in any way. It was like a guy repeating my take out order over the phone. I know what they were going for, but in this case, it was not scary or effective at all. It just became extremely annoying and ridiculous after the first encounter.

Ok, enough, like I said, I only watched this because I saw it had a 6 and read some of the obviously fake reviews. So I was waiting for it to get good, and by the time I lost all hope and realized it was fake I was more than halfway through so I just finished it. Ugh.

I would rather watch weekday, daytime TV over this nonsense... like "My 900 pound life" type of daytime TV. See, I'm normally into quirky types of "B" movies, but this is... quite honestly one of the worst 'films' I have seen in a long, long time. To be fair, I have to put a disclaimer that I saw only about half of it. My whole family agreed we'd rather just watch the Stargate Atlantis rerun that was running on SyFy, so we switched off to that, but I gave it at least a good 40 minutes before I gave up. I'm not sure if you can even call it a film, tbh. I am not exaggerating when I say this has the feel of something I've seen my peers create in Movies class in high school in the late 90s. But they didn't even use Window Movie Maker effects. The production value, effects, and acting are way, way below your typical Matlock episode. It literally seems like a couple of 'bros' got together in a bar and got drunk and decided to make a scifi movie for the hell of it. "uhh huh huh huh dude, yeah man, you should totally make a scifi man, and make sure you give the thing like a hot female face, that always works" . Another way you can look at it is if you were playing the original Half Life and just wandering around Mesa without actually doing anything or encountering anything. My spouse joked that it looks like Iowa Farmland, and although initially I took it as a joke, I became fully convinced that's exactly what they did. It seems like they found an old decommissioned or possibly abandoned car manufacturing plant, as well as a abandoned office building from the 90's +/- 10 years, and just filmed the whole thing there. The initial shots showed car painting/manufacturing robots with literally zero post processing done besides like film grain and upping the contrast. They wander around a large cubicle type of office floor which had been cleared completely of all technology. They placed a couple of old computers on like 2 of the cubicles (out of like 50). The AI's "interface" special effect was literally nothing more than left centered Console Font text in green... There seems to be some sort of AI type entity somewhere in the complex, and that red face you see in the movie posters is literally the ONLY shot they have of the thing. It blinks... Opens and closes it's mouth... looks around. This is worse than stock footage, or maybe that's what it is. You see the camera, on multiple and numerous occasions just sneak up on the characters, as if something is coming up behind them, but it's nothing. Ever. Like how many times can you use a stupid plot device like that? I'm sorry, I just can't... I'll stop now...

Decent Story "B" western... The movie had a pretty good story line. I liked how they presented the viewpoints of different groups and people fairly and realistically, although a bit difficult to swallow at times. It looked like pretty low budget otherwise, but the actors were very well cast I think and most of them did a pretty good job. People have sort of likened it to a Cage movie where you can't quite decide if it's good or bad. But at the end, I'm glad I saw it. It had a realistic message which was explored somewhat with the interactions between the different groups and different interests. I think a good point it made is that getting along is largely determined on an individual by individual basis and how they've decided to fit in into an imperfect world. Sometimes the good guys had good points, sometimes the bad ones did. Nobody's perfect, and this was a good exploration into the complex communities which existed and vied for influence in the twilight years of the Wild Wild West. Some people will surely find it a bit cringe that any of us ever acted this way, but this is just fact. I didn't regret seeing it, let's just put it that way. I would give it 3-4 stars for the actual production, but the story/dialogue/performances really rose above the other issues with sets/wardrobe and were more like around a 6 or so. I'd say this is just about average all things considered; Acceptable.