29 August 2017. A decent and intriguing concept gone awry. This science fiction movie with occult overtones had great promise but it employed a huge mistake, however, in postponing the use of a major flashback using it instead as a supposedly cute revealing twist towards the end of the movie. Starring the relatively unknown Dave Annable along with Ann Heche and Wesley Snipes, this movie is about a special ops team that goes into a secured facility to investigate the disappearance of other members of their team that were staffing the facility. The movie begins and continues with a strong music track with its thunderous, physically pulsating music in the tradition of The Terminator (1984). It also offers up especially in the beginning good cinematography and visual landscape shots. There is good pacing along with the editing and a nice lack of the usual stereotypical character introductions with the characters being all professional and smart. The director makes great use of the actual location interior set and lighting design for the creepy, isolating sensation to build up the suspense.
Yet from a very promising plot outline, the movie follows a flawed script full of distracting, irritating weaknesses that start to pile up. Instead of just revealing a scene of merciless killing at the beginning of the movie, the script attempts to be overly cute believing using it as a wonderful twist would be a brilliant surprise. Instead the audience is presented with a mini-Alien (1979) outline in one minute from the dining scene to the killing scenes in which all the victims find themselves all alone. We have a crappy truck driver who can't see a small girl out of control on her bicycle barreling towards the truck.? We this amazing military team who supposedly have no immediately access to explosives or to make any when they get trapped inside a secret facility. Why not try breaking down a locked heavy loading bay door with a truck or use it as a potential gasoline bomb? It's hard to believe that this team is really "trapped." Then twenty minutes in a gruesome death of a former colleague is discovered, but nobody seems interesting in assessing what might have happened. Then in the forthcoming minutes more bodies start piling up which aren't examined either for clues. Not only that, but the team members seem to end up searching by themselves and not in two by two formations as ordered by Wesley Snipes leaving each of them stupidly vulnerable.
There's another scene further into the movie involving a discussion about the families of the victims that is oddly out of sequence considering the magnitude of the unknown threat that still exists that could emerge to kill any person still left alive. Overlooked until much later is the video replay of events of the beginning of the movie. Then there's the obvious oversight on the part of the team as to who is responsible for the murderous mystery and again the stupid use of a single team members to conduct important tasks without anybody looking at each other's backs.
The basic theme mind control incorporated into movie might have been borrowed from the Galaxy of Terror (1981) plot, B-rated science fiction movie and 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) but again way under used in this movie. Then the movie eventually descends into the typical strained, two-dimensional, paranoid debate between testosterone loaded characters unlike the more captivating and compelling realism of science fiction thriller The Andromeda Strain originated by Michael Crichton's work and adapted into a movie by Robert Wise. It hard to believe that as smart as computer programmers might be having designed supposed the most technologically intrusive lie detector that someone's imagination couldn't extend the logic further, especially with all the similar science fiction movies that have permeated society such as The Matrix (1999) or The Thirteenth Floor (1999), or Total Recall (1990).
As with Event Horizon (1997), this movie appears to take the easy way out with apparent random mysterious happenings without much logical explanation, like a series of Cube (1997) all manner of dying scenes which in Cube's case were connected to a unifying malevolent entity. Strangely even more than half the way through the movie, the team members don't seem to really take serious defensive measure to protect themselves, adding to the unreasonable distracting factor of the movie which continues throughout much of the movie even as things become even interestingly spookier. Yet what seems to work so well for Ridley Scott in Alien (1979) or Hellraiser: Bloodline (1996) or Supernova (2000) in the buildup to and the revelation of the source of the mystery, doesn't seem to have the same ultimately fearful impact. Any why is it that the response to "What is it?" when characters in the movie see something strange they inevitably end up staying "Nothing" of course. The boring, unimaginative clichés have begun to pile up at this point. There's the one death of a character that really doesn't make much sense towards the end of the movie and there's the reality crashing into the mystically science fiction and horror/occult elements like oil and water unsettling the pace and rhythm and tone of the whole movie. Way too much time was spent on the typical violence of most movies instead of the basic more intriguing science fiction theme of the movie. By the end of the movie, the audience has been tossed around like a salad with an unbalanced taste of sweet and sour by a sous chef.
For something that really amazing try the little known science fiction techno thriller The Machine (2013) which is dazzling in its script and delivery.
