Reviews

Ya know it takes nearly the whole movie to reveal its premise--and it's not a novel one--but it taps into a philosophically existential premise: Mankind's need for power, to procreate, to have pleasure. At the end it's a very brief exposé of human history in doing this via one of the primary characters. It also throws a view of religion (or more exactingly, God) with a very different twist for God's purpose for humans. It's not religious at all, but, yes, God gets tossed in the mix. Again, it's more philosophical in that if you tend to be a deep thinker, this will tap into that. And to make this premise workable it's decorated around a movie of aliens, military, threat of human extinction, human history, superior intelligence, human heroics. Most of the aforementioned themes were rather normal and predictable, but the end--the philosophical/religious part--made the movie for me. At the end I was going, "Wow, they went there...and they went there WELL."

Ironically, I just watched the movie "65" last night. It has a similar theme to that movie with (if you're a believer) the Christian (explanation) of "new earth"; "old earth." Without going too far down that path, Christian beliefs (to some extent) describe the history of the earth as "before flood vs after flood." A primary element is thar "before flood" the atmosphere of the earth was much denser, hence, things grew bigger, including animals. This is like a spin-off of that, but, instead, humans concocted a way to do this. But for Hollywood purposes, some wrinkles are tossed in for dramatic/intellectual effect.

This was a clever script based on the good old fashion debate of creation (religious) vs. Evolution (modern science view) of the earth--EXCEPT--no creation view here. It essentially explores the evolutionary view of "once upon a time..." the earth was a planet of gigantic reptiles. Then (spoiler alert) the "early earth" is struck by a meteor (common view for science today) essentially setting into motion catastrophic events that bring us to who/how we are today (in the most prime of human instincts). It's the mixing of a movie/story theme of "man vs. Nature" vs. "man vs. History" that will certainly attract the majority of movie audience. NOW, understand that the elements I've highlighted are not in detail in the movie. You could say I've done some "filling in the blanks." They've been drawn from a science background, so if that ain't your thing, I'd guess much of this review won't hold a lot of water. I just touched on themes (also having a college English background) that I've learned to identify in stories. Either way, it's definitely worth the watch.