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If you want to see what an 8 million dollar budget can get you, using a script that was voted by The Black List as one of the best unproduced scripts of 2016, check out Extinction on Netflix.
Frack me it's bad. Some of the FX is like classic Doctor Who but everything is bad, the acting, the obvious green screen backgrounds and the script. Actually, to be fair the script has a great twist that I only partially worked out. If they'd played this twist way earlier and explored it more then this may have been a lot better.
Apparently Universal dumped this....I can see why.
It would have made a decent Black Mirror episode....if it had been written and produced by the BM team.
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The start was a little stilted. This seems to happen in a lot of netflix films, like the actors are reading their lines and not reacting to the other actors.
The sentimentality was hard to bear., at times.
There were numerous beats that felt a little amateur.
There was also a strange dichotomy between the overall 'why can't we get along' sentimentality and the plot of the story, which suggests the reality is that if you let the Other into your midst in large numbers, they are going to turn against you to protect themselves.
I thought the premise was interesting, until the reveal which is about halfway into the film. The movie lostme at that point, notably the mystery of the flashbacks and what they mean. It suggests that the population occasionally slips back into past memories, and have to be brainwashed" again to live normal lives. This is the only city they occupy, across the entire planet. The invasion happens, with only the elite"of the population know exactly whats going on, while hundreds of the residents die.The invading forces aren't aliens, but humans. They want to reclaim the city by destroying it. They want to exterminate the android population with extreme prejudice, including children" who have remained children for at least two generations.(Androids don't age).It was also suggested that the human military killed normal people who adopted robot kids, who, again, would always remain children.
The humans now live on The Moon or Mars or something like that (!) and been planning to retake this last earth city (?) for decades.
There's no character to relate to. Everyone is oppressed in some way. What is more cruel- a society that manipulates the memories of the population, and does not warn them of impending doom,or the military guys that come back to put everyone out of their misery?
Like I said,its an interesting premise, but the execution of it is banal to say the least. I'm now becoming convinced that the success stories of The Blacklist have turned into a ships graveyard. Not because the scripts are bad, far from it. But they just don't translate well to the screen,or those that made it are sleeping at the wheel. >