dwankan

From the beginning, this film felt cheap and amateurish. I lasted about 20 minutes before the cast, a group gleaned from the youngest looking attendees of a frat party, made up to look "grungy" got on my nerves too much to keep going. I get it that certain films want to feel young and hot, but none of the main cast looked more than 16. This wasn't for fans of the franchise, who likely wouldn't be interested in a cheap teen drama, and the story wasn't interesting enough to make it stand out as a movie on its own.

I'll admit I didn't give it a full chance, so maybe I missed the good stuff, but the production didn't help. The digital work (it was mostly digital fakes) appeared low budget, and was ultimately uninteresting. Prometheus was the last Alien film I enjoyed, and this one seems to have continued the trend of diminishing artistic value. It felt very much like a fan film made by college students.

This could have been a good film. It was packed with tension and an albeit cliche but exciting storyline. Henson's acting was great, and most of the rest of the cast did a beautiful job. Unfortunately, what went wrong went very wrong.

The twist at the end was completely pointless, the kind of twist that made the whole plot meaningless. I've seen some discussions online about the symbolism, but I'll say this and stand by it: I don't care if it's symbolic. Bad plotting is bad plotting, whether you meant it literally or allegorically. If a twist ending cancels out the value of a character's choices, it's a bad ending.

The other problem was bad acting. There were a few really, really bad actors. The rest of the cast did a wonderful job, but those two or three were so bad that every time they showed up, I cringed. I would have thought somebody like Tyler Perry could have managed at least mediocre talent for all of the roles in this film.

I guess I should have expected what I got from this film, but I was hoping for at least a little bit of subtlety. The writing is bad, the acting is bad, the production is worse than amateurish, and the story is laughably ridiculous. I lasted about ten minutes, and the childishness got too much. Every line is delivered with what felt like a joke version of dramatic pauses. One of my favorites early on was a description of the state of things. The narrator explained that the anti-christ had required everyone to receive the mark of the beast (typical rapture fantasy), and then after an extended pause, oh so dramatic, he added the phrase, "to buy groceries." I really hope these people don't take themselves seriously: the film is so absurdly literal in its presentation of the most extreme and ridiculous version of popular fundamentalist Christian end-times prophecy, that it comes across as a parody of the whole thing, but not a well-produced parody, and as such feels like a cheap mockery of the faith.