My hand was forced in to watching this film. After making a schedule which involves reviewing a new film every Tuesday, I had a problem when I remembered I would be away when I would usually watch a new film. So, I turned to the Netflix originals, and Extinction was my only option as it was released just over a week ago. I knew literally nothing about this film going in. I hadn't heard anything about its release or its plot and so I was going into it blind, which was quite exciting. Unfortunately, my excitement didn't last all too long. Not that the film is especially boring, but it is a film that is not original in any real way. Itis a premise and a style that has been done over and over in the history of cinema and science fiction and so there was very little for me to grasp onto and get excited about. And let me tell you now, if I thought it would be hard to review Leatherface (2017) then it is going to be near impossible to review this one. Not because it is worse than Leatherface, far from it, but it is just so much of nothing that I'm going to struggle to find things to talk about. The film follows Peter (Michael Pena) as he suffers from nightmares where he sees his family dying at the hand of alien invaders, which leads to tensions between him and the rest of his family. but it turns out that these nightmares are in fact visions and soon the aliens do come and attack, and the film then follows Peter and his family as they try to escape the city and get away from the invaders.
As you can probably tell from my brief description of the film, this is nothing that we haven't seen before. It reminded me a lot of Steven Spielberg's The War of the Worlds (2005), especially in the look and sound design of the aliens. The family dynamic o the film is not new either, with an absent father being treated with disdain by his family but redeeming himself. The problem with this aspect of the film however is that it is resolved far too easily. It is resolved as soon as the aliens land, not at the end of the film that is often the case, which leaves you wondering why it was ever a plot point in the first place. The script isn't all bad though. The film actually has a twist that I found interesting and that I didn't see coming and it was a pleasant surprise. Even this wasn't without its problems though, as despite it being a good twist, it was only half set up, by this I mean one aspect of the twist was set up brilliantly whereas the other half is not even hinted at once and so it drags the twist down with it. This twist is pretty much the only aspect of the film that I will remember going forward, with the rest being, as I've hammered home, very bland.
The performances in the film are nothing to write home about. Michael Pena as Peter seems like he is miscast throughout most of the film, showing the smallest change in emotion no matter what is going on. Seriously, I wouldn’t be surprised if this character had the same reaction to burning his toast as he did to this alien invasion. Lizzie Caplan, who plays Peter's wife Alice, puts in a decent performance and is probably the best performance in the film. But the film continues to use one of my pet peeves in films, stupid fucking kids. The two children Hannah (Amelia Crouch) and Lucy (Erica Tremblay) don't put in bad performances per say, but my god are they not annoying characters just used to add extra peril to the adult characters, and they are written to be stupid just so they continue to put themselves in precarious positions. If this makes me sound like I dislike children, then you'd be right, but I digress.
The film itself also has no interesting style to it. It is director Ben Young's second full length feature and it shows. He seems to not know what his style is and so just throws a load of techniques in there to try to give the film a style. He uses almost as much slow motion as Zack Snyder (which is a heinous amount) and often at times when it probably isn't needed. There is also one shot where the screen rotates 180 degrees, so the characters are shown to be upside down. This is usually done to make the audience feel uncomfortable, but when used here I'm not sure why it is done. Now this may be Young’s style that he has used in his other projects, but as I have no reference to this I cannot just assume it is, and if it is then it is style that I am not into it. But I will praise Young for one thing, the film is only an hour and a half long which is always appreciated. Also, the special effects are not terrible for a low budget film, although the CGI train at the end is pretty poor quality.
Extinction is very much a nothing film. The first hour is very dull, but it does pick up once the twist is revealed. But there is just nothing to write home about in this film. The whole feel of the film is dull, the premise is nothing new, there are no performances that are really stand out and even though the twist is interesting, it is not executed in the best way. It would be harsh to shit on the CGI too much due to the low budget, and for how much it cost there are some pretty nice-looking shots, but overall the low budget can be seen on the screen. This is the first Netflix original film I have seen, and it is not the best advertisement for their films, and I can’t see myself searching any out (unless of course I have to go away again, and it is my only option, then 'll have to do what I'll have to do).