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glenalec
Reviews
Attack of the Unknown (2020)
Pretty terrible.
Take 1 squad of generic action-flick police.
Mix in 1 part independence Day ship arrival FX, complete with blue energy weapons.
Add a generous helping of bullet-proof rubber-suit aliens. That (mostly) wear helmets, but nothing else.
A few tentacles to bring out the flavour.
A pinch of Aliens (the movie) set decoration near the end.
Under-cook for 100 minutes periodically sprinkling on half the TV-Tropes website's contents.
Spoilers: Aliens are harvesting human blood (rather than growing it by the tank-full in nice sterile controlled lab conditions aboard their inter-stellar-capable ships). Protagonist has blood cancer. You know how it ends.
For a while I was wondering if they were deliberately going for a '60's B-movie theme, but with more modern production techniques, however I don't think that was the intent - it wasn't nearly campy enough to be a deliberate parody.
I have a pretty low expectation threshold for action-sci-fi, and wouldn't call this 'unwatchable', just a rather pointless rehash of tired themes with nothing to say, original or otherwise.
Save Yourselves! (2020)
For certain definitions of 'sci-fi-commedy' only.
If you want a more traditional mass-market 'sci-fi' or 'comedy' then this 'SciFi-Comedy' isn't going to do it for you at all (check the low-star reviews for how that will work out!).
It is basically a light-heated character study with an off-beat premise, and as that -- and just that -- is quite good. There isn't more story than absolutely needed to support the character stuff, and the ending, such as it is, is very open ended. I have enough exposure to non-modern story-telling forms that that doesn't really bother me. YMMV.
The characters were utterly pleasant, though I am a generation behind being able to relate to them or their situation properly, so can't really comment beyond it being very rare that such characters don't just make me frustrated: I don't normally have any patience for 'useless' people fumbling around in the face of adversity, but the writers+actors somehow pulled it off in this instance.
If you like art-films, you may well like this. If you expect something more mainstream, you very probably won't.
Skyline (2010)
There is an easy way to make this enjoyable.
One easy trick. Script-writers hate it! :-D
The problem, as many here have pointed out, is how unlikable the human characters are. They are basically introduced as a bunch of over-privileged self-centered d-bags. What's to like?
I absolutely hated this until I suddenly realized that if you aren't actually introduced to the characters, they are a lot more relatable as random people you just dropped in on mid-crisis (and since the sequel more-or-less does exactly this, I guess the creator came to the same conclusion).
So skip the entire first act of the film where the 'characters' are introduced and start watching from when the aliens first show up (after the party is over and they are asleep just before the aliens turn up). The film then becomes a quite enjoyable sci-fi action-adventure romp. You might even find yourself rooting for the humans, rather than the aliens if you don't let yourself get to know the humans too well beforehand .... So... rather like real life, after all!
2067 (2020)
The story made me think. Like, on behalf of the writer. :-/
Oh dear... 'artificial oxygen'. When this is a key part of the premise, you know things are going to be annoyingly lazy on the science side of the science-fiction!
The time travel paradoxes could actually resolve (at a stretch) under certain interpretations of quantum observer effects. I'm pretty certain the writers didn't know this, though! If they had, they could have put in some additional actually interesting plot using the side-effects, with the bonus of actually explaining the rules for the universe of the story along the way.
Nice visuals, well above what you would expect on the budget. Overall premise had great potential, frustratingly squandered by lazy+unintelligent writing and especially dialog well over the boundary into purple prose. And please save me from yet another protagonist with debilitating daddy issues!
I don't need my 2 hours back, but it certainly lacks any re-watch value. Not even worth a fan-edit, which could probably bring the move up from a 3 to a 5 or even 6: just relocating a few of the emotional scenes (not necessarily bad in themselves) to before the (literal) ticking clock starts, and tightening out most of the runtime padding would remove a lot of the more frustrating-to-watch aspects of the film.