Nomad: The Beginning

Not very long movie but seems long drawn out.

The characters are forgettable and by the end I didn't care who lived or died, there was no suspense, not much action, a lot of confusion and a lot more just plain nonsense. Add to that the acting was below average, music was bland and script dull I just wanted to fast forward it but needed to watch it all to do a review and no point reviewing a movie without watching it all.

The sound was hit and miss, at one point it sounded like it was added on afterwards and another point Marianna was moving her lips like she was talking but no sound came from her.

Michael Madsen seems to be the main actor according to the movies website but he was hardly seen in it and wasn't even listed in the cast list on IMDb, maybe he asked not to be included and I wouldn't blame him Lol.

Oh and the ending, that was lame too.

Yaawwwn.

The basic plot, if you can call it that, is a bunch of poor d-list actors were programmed to follow the commands of an unseen voice who telephones them occasionally to provide no actionable information. The actors proceed to do random things, ostensibly for the unseen voice? Sure, why not. A woman has her brother kidnapped by someone for some reason, though that doesn't matter because aside from a few minutes spent working on the ransom subplot, she forgets all about him. The other programmed guys are given pointless disconnected things to do, sometimes involving killing other characters. Okay. Some confused voice over involving aliens is offered but what that has to do with anything is not explained. A couple characters have sex. Everyone forgets what they were doing and begins doing other disconnected things. At no point does a single story arc go from beginning to end.

The characters are interchangeable. If they have names they aren't used enough to be memorable. No character is granted anything approaching a personality. When the movie ends, the only thing we learned about anyone in this film is that they can't act.

How do these efforts get funded? The only way the script could have excited potential investors is if they never read it. No one would back a cast of unknowns with the acting talent of stand ins for a high school drama production. The crew are of the type who responded to a Craigslist ad "If you own a video camera or microphone or anything else that might be useful in movie making call us now!". Why anyone spent time, money, and effort on this confused poorly acted mess is a mystery for the ages.

Hard to think of anything worthy of a star. From certain angles the lead actress was kinda cute. There you go. One star.

This movie contains no battlefield. There is an alien but he doesn't turn up until nearly the end. I wouldn't sit around and wait for him as you will find better aliens on any old Star Trek rerun. The DVD case also features a lot of soldiers with artillery weapons who do not appear at any point. The case also makes a big deal of the spaceship which also really only appears for the final credits and looks quite a lot like a cardboard box when it does. Aside from the disappointing special effects, what does happen is pretty slow paced for a film that clock in under an hour and half. Michael Madsen does appear, but has clearly shot his scenes on the way to lunch as he doesn't leave his limo.

Writer/Director Thomas Dixon's low-budget Sci-fi smorgasbord of pretty boy Mk-Ultra assassins, happy-helmeted remote viewers, benign, pointy-eared aliens, a fearlessly feisty female protagonist, and sinister species Michael Madsen shouting authoritatively in a limo, 'Alien Battlefield pretty much has it all; curiously omitting the alien battlefield! While not entirely without merit, the film's over-reliance on refried Area 51 backbeats, garishly purloined 'Ancient Aliens' pseudo-science, and proto-paranoid, black-hatted X-files jeopardy made for an overly familiar tableau, happily, the acting from a committed, relatively unfamiliar cast was pretty robust all round, and the clearly engaged director had the good sense to keep the pace brisk enough to disguise the frequent lapses in originality, but, ultimately, like all too many genre films today it just all feels a tad too recycled, just another shrill, rehashed old school 50s-style 'the aliens are among us!' negative head trip, it's like Philip K. Dick, and William Gibson never happened! All that being said, I still quite enjoyed watching 'Alien Battlefield', as the two imperilled leads were sympathetically earnest, and handsome hero John (Clint Hummel) was charismatically imbued with some pleasingly rough Spaghetti western charm, making for a suitably studly action man, and moody Madsen sports a natty pair of alien contact lenses, so it boisterously hit enough of my B-movie buttons to adequately pass the time! Fans of Albert Pyun, Richard Pepin, Fred Olen Ray, and 90s-era Roger Corman schlock might be more susceptible to Alien Battlefield's low wattage mind meld than others!