Proximity

Wow this was bad. A whole lot of nothing - 119 min to be exact, that felt like an eternity with the ridiculously slow pacing. Writer, director, producer, and editor Eric Demeusy makes his first full-length feature film debut, having 6 previous short films on his resume. This should've been his 7th short film, because the 2 hours I had to sit through, was hell. It was cheesy - MIB guys, seriously?, the music and score were ridiculous - annoying and out of place, as was the "I-cant-decide-what-this-film-is-going-to-be-about" writing. Just a variety of up-chuck splattered everywhere. The acting was stale and boring - probably from the lack of direction by Demeusy. The only redeeming quality was the cinematography and some visuals (not the laser beams lol), which is what Demeusy's role has been in the film industry. That's were most of my 4/10 goes towards, and includes cutting a newb filmmaker some slack. Not deserving of anything less, because filmmakers have to start somewhere, right?

This film is kind of a fascinating trainwreck of someone who was trying to be Spielberg but also wanted to be John Hughes. It mean, it's so...uneven. The photography is fine, the dialogue is above average, the acting solid. But I would never have thought this was written and directed by the same person; it feels like the writer and director were at odds with each other.

The basis of the story is a video of an alien that a guy says he shot, and the story is driven by whether it is real or not...but you never get to see the video. It's like a McGuffin...but you NEED to see it to validate the other characters' responses. It's cheating the viewer by not letting you see it for yourself.

And the music is TERRIBLE. Invasive, and tries to drive the emotion of the scene in all the wrong directions. I swear, if I produced this and heard that music in the final cut, I would have paid out of my own pocket to have it re-scored.

It's not awful. It's not unwatchable. But it always feels off tempo, off balance...and not in a good way.

Overall: Meh.

Sat through this thinking we may have a very rare but decent Sci-Fi film, sadly it wasn't the case. Okay it was a watchable yarn, but that's all it was. The budget was there the CGI and locations were there and everything about this film said quality but apart from some dodgy acting moments something just didn't click or gel. Again, the most important 10 minutes of First Contact dialogue at the end of the film was over shadowed by annoying and unnecessary music making it difficult to hear the dialogue...Why do movie producers insist on doing that these days!....Dialogue or music not both and certainly not at the same time!

But ... it plays out as a like an average feeling kids movie made by well intended amateurs. The main protagonist teen actor did a great job, as did his female sidekick. The rest of the characters were either badly directed or miscast. There are sections where the film shines, but these sections are quickly superseded by ridiculous film-craft in other parts.

Pedestrian direction and editing (get experienced people to do this), completely un-scary and miscast villains with over-sized suits in some cases (Agents are meant to have money. A fitted suit indicates the agent is well resourced. Thus an over-size suit on an agent is hugely distracting), comedic robots which don't intimidate at all and yes the most comedic men-in-black you could image. I laughed out loud when these guys in sunglasses strolled down the hall. Why put comedy into a serious scene?

The scene near the end where they escape, it was impossible to figure out what the heck was happening there. There was not enough precedent to the characters powers that we could draw upon to make sense of that scene. You need to make the details of superpowers clear early on, so we can know what to expect. Ie: Why does the glass disappear to the guy with powers, but not disappear to someone else watching? You need to answer this question in the film somewhere, and make it obvious. Otherwise we are looking at a frustratingly confusing film that had so much potential. If some thinking was done on what to include in the film or not, there would've been great improvement.

Hats off to providing a satisfying alien explanation scene.

So it's present day, our guy works at JPL and is a geek neither he, or anybody else has a smart phone and people exchange numbers by writing them down. A guy who says he writes a blog, gives a business card that has no email address or URL . People go on line but don't exhibit any normal behaviour of modern kids. It's still bearable until the men in black and the stormtroopers arrive and then it descends into a zero budget student movie with an unapologetic hijacking of science by religious twaddle.