it's almost in the "so mid its compelling" category rrrgghh spoilers? under the cut for a lukewarm movie. it's my scathing review and how I would have fixed each point to make it better.
I hate grey aliens. do better. it's 2026. I would have bumped the movie up a full point if the aliens looked unique. this is Paranormal Activity all over again. grey aliens are for when the aliens are silly little guys, not scary extra terrestrials
there wasn't enough cohesion in the abilities of the Device. it should have been strictly psychic. having it be a get out of jail free card for several scenes was stupid. even the drawbacks of the Device weren't explained enough to make me care about them as drawbacks
I wanted more backstory or flashbacks. they used flashback in a very specific (stupid) sequence at the end when it should have been used throughout to help contextualize things. The villain says "it almost killed me last time I used the Device" and then were never shown how or why he almost died. we're shown the device used presently to great pain, but I wanted to see what was so important he almost died for it.
the camera work was a little nauseating sometimes. there's a few scenes where the camera goes over or under scene elements, or flips 180° fancily and they were just annoying and not cool to watch. you can be dynamic and not annoying
they under explained the whole thing with the two kids. it needed help. it was kinda just there when it didn't need to be. they could have written them as separate abduction victims and also made the abductions less stupid. you went with grey aliens, have people get tractor beamed out of their beds and probed or something.
the animals were horrifyingly CG. get animal actors or better CG. those sucked. they were supposed to look un natural but they didn't push it enough so they just look like bad effects.
really this movie needed 30 minutes more of explanations and 30 minutes less of car chases.
the religious exploration in it was hamfisted and dumb and they didn't pay off about the nun seeming to know about aliens.
the last scene with everyone looking at their phones around the US is dumb. even if 9/11 part 2 happened today like 40% of people would see it and 60% would be at work. also the AI scanner but was dumb. I would have focused more on the news spreading over social media vs livestream
invisibility made some sense, but also felt dumb in its execution, not sure how I'd fix that element idk.
the "not FBI" corporation that owns the videos and devices needed more fleshing out. is it pinkertons or is it the government?
the 2.5 straight couples in it were boring and sucked. didn't feel their romantic connections and didn't care about them.
pacing was bad, I checked my phone twice for time and also even looked up the runtime while in the theatre bc it was atrocious. sorry anyone else who really loved it and was mad I looked at wikipedia for 2 seconds during it
not 100% the movies fault but the 40 minutes of military ads before it were also shite
I liked the idea of psychic power aliens, it's a cool way to make them more advanced than us.
I liked the idea of the Device as a psychic observation tool, and it made a lot of sense for use as a military weapon.
the acting was all very good, working with what they had
practical effects when present were good enough (minus a cringe IV scene).
this has been mid movie reviews with donnie
