I suppose there's nothing wrong with wanting to make your own sci-fi action flick. If you have the means, even if not the absolute best of means, then why not? The special effects are actually pretty solid for the most part, though as is often the case, the more they dominate a scene the more unseemly they are. The production design and art direction are nothing special, but suitable such as they are. Action sequences are reasonably well done; all aspects of the technical craft are fine. James Schafer's music is decent in and of itself, though nothing to proverbially write home about.
From there the picture starts to become more suspect. Basically as soon as it begins one can only wonder what genre tropes it will or will not play with. That 'One shot' goes the 'Star Trek' route of making its non-human characters ("Ceruleans") look extremely human, with only scant cosmetic differences, is perhaps extra unfortunate here since the picture doesn't have any other qualities that really leap out. The costume design is but perfunctory, and equally uninspiring generally (blah blah military garb, blah blah civilian clothing). Specifically, a little worse is that from what we see of Cerulean civilians and their sartorial arrangements, and glimpses at their culture, their conception is nothing more than a direly weak, unimaginative, and somewhat dubious and unlearned borrow: "Hey, the Middle East is pretty alien, right? What if the Ceruleans were inspired by the Middle East?"
Meanwhile, I've seen more than a few titles from filmmaker John Lyde at this point, and I know him to be a capable filmmaker within those spaces he chooses for himself. It really seems in 'One shot' as though he's just phoning it in with his direction, cinematography, editing, and production - there's nothing wrong with it, but it's also perfectly unremarkable. More tired still is Adam Abram's screenplay. Characters are as empty as characters can be; dialogue is without exception dull and flat; scene writing is defined by these same traits. Plot is minimal, yet the more we get, the more it's cemented that the movie is doing nothing more than transplanting all the worst facets of "Joe Blow Know It All's vague, unsophisticated, mostly racist ideas of what Middle Eastern culture is" onto the Ceruleans, and all the most self-inflated, bloviating jingoist "Mission Accomplished" military bluster of the modern United States onto the humans in this unspecified future. There are notable themes on hand, but they are approached with no delicacy or care and quickly get lost in the mire.
Between Lyde's unbothered direction here, and even more so Abram's painfully hollow or even questionable writing, the cast have little to work with. They do the best they can, but it's not enough. All the while, 'One shot' fails to elicit a baseline level of interest, let alone thrills or impact. There are some good ideas here; they are misused, and amount to nothing. I didn't have high expectations when I sat to watch, yet still I'm disappointed by how profoundly middling this film is. There are bare-bones fragments of what could have been something good and worthwhile, but think of this as the cinematic equivalent of a leg whose weight-bearing bones have been completely shattered. Apologies to those who did work hard on 'One shot,' only for their contributions to result in something that trips over its own two left feet; commendations to those who watch this and find more value in it than I did. For my part, I simply can't recommend this - there are too many other flicks you could and should be watching instead.
