One Shot

I started to watch this lame excuse for a film on GREAT movies action on UK Freeview as I just needed an evening vegging out after a hard day at work. However, I was unable to relax as this film - called Sniper Elite in the UK - is woeful and irritatingly so. I enjoy trashy alien movies such as Cowboys vs Aliens. At least in that film they made and effort to make the alien soldiers look extra-terrestrial. The costume manager for this film probably got a job lot of SWAT uniforms at an army surplus store. The rest of the budget was probably spent on half a dozen tubes of Colgate blue gel toothpaste for the aliens' blue blood; a few cans of industrial black paint for the plywood set masquerading as the interior of a space station; some bedsheets out of which to make Arabic looking costumes for the non-military aliens. I doubt anything was spent on the cast as they had very little to do, except run around or look sincere/intense. To save the money spent on the army surplus gear and toothpaste the producers appear to have done away with the need for a screenwriter and director and let the actors ad lib lines. Of course, the aliens speak English/American. You know what? This film doesn't even deserve to have viewers wasting their time writing a review let alone watching this drivel. I actually gave up after 50 minutes. It's right down there with Jaws, The Revenge as one of the worst films I've ever seen.

Just because a film has a low budget, doesn't mean it needs to be stupid.

There's too many moments where our hero stands out in the open, surrounded by enemies and yet they all miss. They are worse than Stormtroopers!! Supposedly well trained military do the most ridiculous things.

The other rather annoying thing is that despite the film being called Sniper Elite on Amazon Prime, there's very little actual sniping.

The story drags and goes nowhere. There's a really out of place monologue towards the end that is laughable. Most of the run time is spent trudging across a flat desert / scrub land.

There's maybe a vaguely interesting premise behind this film, but it is lost under the weight of bad story telling, awful script, cliche, and poor direction.

This movie is a bad sniper movie and an even worse science fiction movie. It looks cheap in all aspects. The CGI looks cheap and makes no sense at all. The bombardment scene in the beginning is a joke (a building collapsing like being demolished by carefully set explosive devices). The animations of vehicles look like SF games from the 90s.

The costumes and weaponry are 90s Earth, on both sides (alien side too!). They did not even try to make them look different. Only the firing sound comes out of a PC and sounds just like that. The effects of bullet hits are erratic, sometimes solid rock explodes, sometimes a helmet face get's cut off as clean as with a laser torch, guy inside totally unharmed. Then suddenly, the "hero" starts running through enemy lines without any cover and takes them all out firing a pistol. Needless to say, that none of them shooting assault rifles hit him seriously, they already spent their luck moments before, cutting down his entire unit without resistance.

The sniping techniques are beginners at best, most of the stuff shown is only show and has no real use. The reticules are fantasy style and use blurry hexagons to make shooting even harder.

The movie has zero story. A few screens showing you beautiful young women try to tell you the basics of what has happened. Humans went to an alien inhabited planet and started a war. The "aliens" look 100% identical to humans (yeah, budget i know) wearing turquoise contact lenses. They speak in a rough makeup language producing metallic and static sounds that make no sense (no, they are not cybernetics). They wear black (evil color) suits and metal helmets that look a bit like a knight's helmet meets Darth Vader.

The whole movie,yes the whole movie, is made up of scenes where the protagonists runs away, hides, sets up to snipe a few of his pursuers, then continues. Ah, and a few scenes on board a mysterious military station in orbit where officers watch and comment his actions but do NOTHING to help him.

Finally he meets the damsel in distress, an alien woman, confronts a fellow human soldier (he must defeat him in close combat obviously) and get's saved by his enemy, the alien sniper because he showed mercy and compassion to the atrocities done to the aliens by humans (his comrades).

The whole movie was an excuse to show someone use a sniper rifle (wrongly).

If you are looking for a science fiction movie, skip it. If you are looking for a sniper movie, look further. Nothing else to be seen here. Overrated Miss Aiden doesn't add anything to the movie, even trying to look good is a pain here.

One can only hope that the director will not raise any further money via Kickstarter to undertake another adventure into the realms of movie making. This movie was not even well-meant. If it was a student's first full movie attempt...no, even then it would disappoint.

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.

A certain waste of everyone's time, including the supposed aliens - saved money by having them humans, as well.

Hot babe , but not enough to make this nything other than implausible, unlikely, poorly executed and acted - and generally and specifically stupid.

Why there is a length requirement for trash movies is odd - given this one is so bad ... bad as in really, really bad. How bad is it? It is so bad, once one realizes it is this bad, they know it is bad. Trying to consider more ways to say how bad is hard given how bad it is - bad and goofy equipment including skywalket things and bad costumes and bad acting ... really bad.