Invasion Planet Earth

Still have 20 min left of the movie and can't decide whether to watch to the end or just gouge my eyes out.

Thomas Dunn is having a terrible day fit for a soap opera. Full of cliches, careless editing and continuity errors this is less a film and more of a red headed stepchild of Ed Wood.

We watch the story unfold with special effects so poor, they qualify as neither. Acting is also pretty painful for the most part with performers struggling to overcome a clunky and predictable story and a script that feels like a chainsaw lobotomy.

The value in Invasion Planet Earth is for film students looking to see how never to make a movie.

The story of getting the film made is very inspiring, but not relevant to whether the film is any good or not. And sadly, it isn't. It's woeful in almost every regard.

The overall story is an interesting idea, but everything from the terrible script, the uniformly awful supporting cast, the stagey direction/editing and the mostly cheap VFX make you wonder why they even bothered.

If given the right resources maybe the director could come up with something impressive, but this is not a good calling card.

What the producers have used as a selling point for the movie (it took a 100 years to complete) has set it up to be ridiculed and sadly for legitimate reasons. I can forgive bad CGI but not poorly recorded dialogue, ever. It sounds terrible in some areas and almost average in others. The image is barely professional in parts too. It looks amateur mainly because it's so soft and cheap looking. The story itself had me wondering why no one had taken this team to the side early on and questioned its overall message and goal. It has lots of genres blended together but with out a cohesive tie. I was lost for most of it and even laughed at some of the silly lines. I reasoned that if this had the intention of being a parody or spoof comedy it would be fitting. It doesn't fail because of its low budget roots. It doesn't fail because of its funny CGI. It fails because it's a weak story constructed poorly and the producers let the sound down (cardinal sin). It fails because we expect more in this day and age and despite the 'time' this took to complete it just doesn't cut it.

As much as I love science fiction, this movie - rated at 3.3 - is overrated precisely by 3.3. I gave it 1 star just because there is 0 star rating. I don't know where to start: acting is bad, script is even worse, special effects are laughable. I would understand if it was primary school project but commercial movie production? Really?