Extinction

Chances are Extinction will remind audience to other zombie or survival movies, such as I Am Legend or even The Walking Dead television series. It uses many familiar elements in this already packed subgenre and honestly it doesn't boast that high of production value. The saving grace is its human drama, which may not be perfect, but acted and crafted fine enough to present a solid survival story.

Patrick (Matthew Fox) and Jack (Jeffrey Donovan) are two neighbors surviving in cold wasteland. Both of them had unusual past which eventually drifted them apart, but they now must reconcile to protect a child from escalating threat. The pace is shifted from present to past regularly to showcase their backstories while the story moves forward.

This method does set some nice character developments, furthermore the actors are definitely capable enough to make it work, seeing that the runtime of nearly two hours revolve around them. It does feel a bit slow at times since the angst and redemption theme are repeated frequently. The movie tries to deliver a few twists, these might not be outright predictable, but not exactly strong and occasionally reaching too far to produce emotional tone.

Actual zombie assault takes much less portion of the movie than the drama, yet it is still made pretty well. Design and effects look better than most of smaller budget flicks. It won't look cheap or campy when the action starts, but it does tend to follow overused path of bald white creature and its quirky antics.

The effort put to personal story and action survival might not suffice to rise above the horde, but it doesn't go to waste since Extinction, despite its flaws, is adequate for a survival tale.

If you are looking for a good zombie movie look no further. This little gem is a character driven film with just the right amount of action.

This is not an action movie with zombies or a cheap independent gore- flick. This movie actually has some substance. Which can't be easy in the zombie genre.

Big thanks to the cast and director for taking the genre "seriously". This makes it a good movie and a great zombie flick.

I was even a bit surprised by the two main actors ability to cast away their regular TV acting skills and leap into film acting. Who knew they could push themselves to this level. Hope to see more of this in their future endeavors.

As far as the film goes, a tragedy takes place at the beginning of the movie which puts the two men against each other. Now when I first saw the trailer to this flick I knew it wouldn't be a high budget film. So going into the first 1 hr of the film had me a bit worried that it would be full of cheesy special effects. But instead the script writer maintains focus on the two protagonists and the kid, which is a smart way to do a low budget film less gore, less explosions, less cost. I found it to be quite scary at certain points especially when you see a camera turn away from one of the actors you know something is going to pop out behind. Matthew fox does a pretty good job maintaining a strange character with some sort of secret but if you're like me you can piece it together no problem. I really enjoyed the make up designs for the evolved zombies, but it didn't pan out to be as great as I expected. If you dig movies such as the descent or even 30 days of night I'm sure you will find a shed of enjoyment with the film. Don't over sell yourself thinking it is a complete sleeper it will have its moments, but unfortunately a short hand of them.

I've been compelled to write this review after reading the former ones. As this film is quite remarkable in many things I can only understand the very bad reviews as spurious stuff. Why I say that comes below: Very good performances. Matthew Fox, Jeffrey Donovan and the girl Quinn McColgan are perfect in their work. You really get into the movie with them. There's always a narrative nerve that never decays. The photography is usually evocative. The characters are elaborated and likely. They evolve as the screenplay unfolds. The movie is, in general, entertaining and the action scenes are well filmed. Maybe is not the most original sci-fi movie but no doubt it's a more than decent one.

At first I thought "Oh no, not another zombie movie!", but from the very first minutes I got hooked. The beginning scene of the film is great and reveals the overall theme of the movie: it is not about why or the how, it's all about the who.

Extinction is rather badly chosen a title, because the scope of the film is not global, but very localized, very human and personal. It feels more like a play, with a total of four roles that are worth mentioning. It is not about a problem that someone solves, but goes back to the core of the zombie genre, the pure survival of the group of individuals in a hostile world. The creatures themselves are very secondary with the focus on the people, with complex and well written characters.

Bottom line: this film deserves a lot more recognition than the IMDb rating seems to indicate. It is not a masterpiece, but certainly a work of art, not another recycled "run, shoot, run" clone. It lasts for two hours and it is a slow paced character driven story. So glad to see well written stories from time to time.