Alien Warfare – a review (Netflix)

    It was calling me. When a film registers two point four on IMDB, it is begging to be reviewed. Begging I tell ya! The opening credits, which looked like they were knocked up on a budget PC, are woeful. They are, mercifully, short. Unfortunately, the film begins. Whoa, it’s terrible. I am writing this as I watch the film and it’s painful.

    Make no mistake, I am doing you a service by telling you – no – warning you, not to watch this film. This film is a car wreck. Netflix obviously does not watch everything they output. The script is woeful, the acting – ha! – is nonexistent, the story bollocks, camera work is….in focus? 

   Navy Seals team, Mike (Clayton Snyder), his brother, Chris (David Meadows), Jonesy (Daniel Washington) and Thorpe (Scott C. Roe) are sent on a covert, top-secret mission, to check out a mysterious research site of multiple disappearances. 

   Chris is leading the mission, though it is his brother Mike who has always been the leader. We are shown, in an opening sequence, that in an earlier mission to rescue a world leader, Mike’s decision gets the leader killed. That becomes an issue when running the present mission. 

   When they get to the research facility, they find it completely vacant except for one lone survivor, Isabella (Larissa Andrade), a scientist who survived a blast that incinerated everybody else on the base. 

    There is an alien artefact in the base that caused the annihilation of everyone on the base when attacked. This information is relayed to the Seals by Isabella. Aliens attack the base. Mike works out, because he is obviously a genius, that the aliens want to invade earth. 

    In every encounter with the aliens, the guns prove no use whatsoever. These Seals, knuckleheads that they are, unload unholy amounts of ammo at them whenever they encounter them. Of course, it is a complete waste of time. They find out, by accident, that the aliens are affected by electrical signals and hatch a plan to lure them all into one place so as to kill them.

    When that plan goes awry and one of the team, Chris, is taken, Jonesy, who had been taken by one of the aliens earlier and saw their home planet – yes he did – tells them about a spiral pattern. Photographers and mathematicians will understand, the rest of us it’s like ‘what?!’ Isabella and Thorpe, who both have a love of language and communication, work out how to open the artefact.

    The aliens, it turns out, are not trying to invade the planet but trying to retrieve one of their own, who happens to be inside of the artefact that is in the research base. Mike, now leading the team and desperate to get his brother back, confronts the aliens with their brethren. Initially, he threatens to kill the being unless he gets his brother back. He quickly relents and they swap brother for the alien. 

    The groups acknowledge a peaceful truce and the alien beam up to their spaceship and fly off. Chris and Mike wonder what they are going to tell the top brass. The end. 

    Oh god, Jesus wept, my eyes! This film is staggeringly awful. In times past, when there was such a thing as shame and fame or notoriety at any cost was not craved, a right-minded person, on watching this wretched mess, would replace their name in credits with Alan Smithee, directors would anyway, a pseudonym used to avow credit of particularly bad work. What a writer would do is anybody’s guess. 

    All concerned with this project should have adopted a pseudonym. The directing – step forward Jeremiah Jones – is atrocious, the writing – Ben Bailey, Dave Baker, and Nathan Zoebl – is the kind of thing a fourteen-year-old sci-fi geek might come up with and he would still get a ‘D’ minus. 

   The acting is so shockingly bad that you might think that they were all friends of the director. I would think that they are all enemies of the director as only an enemy would put anyone in a project this woeful. If he had any friends in on this project, they are either no longer friends or played the parts of aliens so no one saw their faces. 

    The film is ninety minutes long and feels like it last five hours. You could not get high enough to enjoy this film. I am almost angry reviewing it, it’s so terrible. There must be a fund that Netflix has and are just giving away money for people to create content, that could be the only reason they did not pass on this film. 

    This is, hands down, the worse film I have watched on Netflix. I’m am confident that I will not see a worse film this year. I may see a more disappointing film but I will not see a more inept, badly executed, miserable excuse for a film as Alien Warfare in the rest of 2019. Avoid, you have been warned.