Arrowhead

This movie may be a good first time effort for the director, but it does almost everything wrong. The story can't decide what it's about, the characters are thinly sketched and inconsistent, the effects from tolerable to embarrassing, and the sets and locations looked almost exactly like a 70s Doctor Who or Star Trek effort. There is sometimes a decent atmosphere and some camera work is effective. But it's the muddled story which often makes no sense, that killed it for me. It's not that is was too complex, it's simply that scenes, and even individual dialog lines, didn't connect to each other in any way.

I think possibly if you watched it slightly drunk and with the sound off, it could seem like an amusing diversion, because of some effective images - mostly skies with planets and ships. But trying to follow it like a proper movie just leads to disappointment.

Of course I had never heard about this 2016 sci-fi movie titled "Arrowhead", from writer and director Jesse O'Brien, prior to sitting down and watching it here in 2025. Normally, then sci-fi is not my go-to genre for entertainment. But I will watch the occasional sci-fi movie now and again. And without knowing what I was in for here, I suppose writer and director Jesse O'Brien had every opportunity to entertain and impress me.

However, I found the script and storyline to be somewhat dull. It was a slow paced narrative, and there wasn't really much of anything interesting happening, and that made it quite an ordeal and a struggle to sit through 98 minutes of this.

I was not familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list, and that actually spoke in favor of the movie, as I enjoy watching new and unfamiliar talents on the screen. I will say that the acting performances in "Arrowhead" were good.

Visually then the movie was actually good. Not jaw-droppingly impressive or anything, but good.

"Arrowhead" is a movie that will appeal way more to fans of the sci-fi genre, way more than it did to me as a casual viewer.

My rating of writer and director Jesse O'Brien's 2016 movie "Arrowhead" lands on a four out of ten stars.

This is a sincere effort, not a piece of schlock (which is how it earned its fourth star from me), and does quite well with its budget, and the acting is reasonable (I especially liked Shaun Micallef's voice work as the shuttle's AI system, RE3F (pronounced "reef")). The problem is that while the film throws a fair number of potentially interesting ideas at the wall, it thinks that more of them stick than actually do, and if the exact rules of how one of the big ones worked were ever made clear it went right by me.

(It's also frustratingly slow-moving at times. At 95 minutes in length, it could have been easily done at 70 to 75.)

I would say that when it comes to judging good science fiction movies I have a good sense of sniffing out the good from the bad, normally I can tell within just few minutes if the movie holds any promise, but this movie is somewhat very strange… it starts of very weak even through a big chunk of the budget was spent in the first 20minutes of the movie, I found myself compelled to continue watching even when it didn't hold much appeal! I'm glad I waited, the story picked up and the acting is 10x better in the second half of the movie than it was at the start, its rare to see a movie that goes from so bad to so good, and I have to take my hat off to the entire crew for pulling of a superb low-budget sci-fi.

I was expecting another low-budget Sci-Fi shambles, but this is an entertaining movie with good quality production and acting. There is a lot of stuff going on in the plot to keep the viewer's attention, though most if not all the ideas are taken from other movies, and I'm not sure if the story that comes together here makes 100% sense. The basic motivations, conflicts, and relationships of the characters are rather incompletely developed so it is hard to invest much emotionally, but over-simplifying characterization to squeeze it into a movie's time constraints often just elicits the audience's contempt. Not a ingenious masterpiece, but a decent movie that rehashes some neat ideas.