Sanpo suru shinryakusha

I very much enjoyed "Before we Vanish" at Serbia's FEST2018, the premise of an alien invasion allowing the film to stage an entertaining but believable depiction of humans robbed of very specific parts of their brains, namely the supposed segments which would contain ideas such as "property" and "self". Despite running for over 2 hours it stayed on course til the end, even against ever-escalating violence, and delivered a nice payoff with an ending worth talking about.

The predominantly youthful cast had fun with the script, in itself already full of laughs, though it never wandered off into goofiness for the sake of it. Really my only complaint of the whole experience regarded the person sitting next to my girlfriend, a college-student-looking dude who at first glance seemed like the best type of person to be sitting next to in the theater, making use of his time before the lights went out to read a very old looking book; only to disappoint us and many others in the venue by not making it more than thirty seconds without letting out a sneeze, cough or long sniffle. Even so, this seriously ill person managed to have a few chuckles of his own, supporting the film's notion that men left without crucial concepts like "contagion", "karma" or "decency" could still live enjoyable, if oblivious, lives.

Three star said it was boring - they're wrong - it's worse than boring. The storyline plot premise of aliens taking over human bodies to conquer the planet or whatever has many past iterations/forms all of which made an alien presence somewhat believable. In this case all we get are humans acting (actually stilted acting with lots of stilted talking) like narcissistic superficial humans - just talking about themselves. In the beginning there was a bloody (not shown - just aftermath) of daughter killing parents which made no sense and nothing came of it and then later a few scenes of brief gun battles between an alien human and humans and finally little fire balls coming down that was suppose to represent aliens invading (the special effects part).

It was more creative and successful than I expected. The story and the alien design were original in my opinion. Their acting and emotional experiences were also good. As an American cliché, the low scores of non-American films are due to the stereotypical members of IMDb.

I can't really fairly review this movie because I pulled it off the internet and the home-made subtitles were often incomprehensible. But I can say that the trailer that inspired me to hunt this down was a lie. This is a two-hour movie with maybe 25 minutes of fighting and explosions, and the trailer made it look like a John Woo movie.

Instead, this is a rather slow-moving drama about extraterrestrials on earth to prepare an invasion. The most interesting idea in the film is that these aliens can only understand human concepts, like love or ownership, by absorbing them. Doing so removes that concept from the human, in some cases leaving them angry or confused but other times giving them a revelatory happiness.

I might have liked this movie more with better subtitles - certainly I would have been clearer on the fine points - but I would have rather watched the movie the trailer had promised me than the one I got.

The first 20 minutes of this film are amazing, eerie and keep you on the edge of your seat. Then the rest of the film falls flat from there. Some cool concepts but they're muddled all over the place and in the end, it's a one dimensional film that had so much promise but never delivered.

Worth watching the first 20 minutes.