Director: Some Australian guy
Date: 2022 – the beginning of the apocalypse. Platform: Netflix.
Starring: Elsa Pataky and some other people who no one has heard about.
Look, I’m sure Elsa is a lovely person and she has a nice relationship and a great loving family with the God of Thunder himself. And she’s a working actor and therefore needs to work. Gotta pay those bills for your Byron Bay mega property somehow.
But the fact is, right now, this movie is one of my front-runners for worst film of 2022 and calling it a “film” is actually quite generous.
I won’t go into the plot, it’s boring, cliched and generally a rehash of so many military/technological/terrorists-aiming-to-nuke-the-world that it doesn’t even really rate that much of a discussion.
This film was shot in New South Wales (Australia) and the producers admitted they wanted to keep the budget under $15 million and boy does it show.
All the action is pretty much contained to one stage set, albeit with the usual crappy CGI wide shots of helicopters flying around what looks like a very unimpressive oil-rig cum military missile defence platform.
The sets are crappy. The CGI sucks. My nephew Joe said he could do a better job for $100 using his AMD Threadripper and a copy of Blender. Note: neither company endorse this review.
But Joe is a kid and therefore his opinion is invalid. Much like this movie.
Elsa is totally out of place as a US army (or is it Navy – I don’t remember and don’t really care) technical specialist. This is conveniatly handwaved very early on in the film with Replaceable Army Girl #2 saying “I heard your dad was based in a US camp in Spain, so that’s where you grew up) and also, “girls get it done etc.”
This film is all kinds of boring, yeah sure it has some serviceable technical qualities but it’s so boring that the script looks like it came out of some AI-based content platform. There’s nothing new here.
There’s the usual “she was demoted due to bad evil army man sexual harrassment – but she still kicks arse”, the terrorists are of course soldiers gone rogue who feel the USA has gone astray and all that. In that context this movie makes Michael Bay’s “The Rock” look like a frickin’ masterpiece.
This sort of schlock straight-to-streaming is just another example of why Netflix is now in serious trouble, You can only watch so much of this stuff before your attention drifts and you go off to do something more entertaining, like cutting your toenails or taking out the recycling.
Caveat: This was actually ranked #1 on Netflix (at least in Australia) for some time. So clearly what do I know?
End times people. End times.