Alien Convergence (2017)
Starring Caroline Ivari, Stephen Brown, Michone Feigin
Directed by Rob Pallatina
Alien Convergence delivers everything you want in a movie about giant flying, energy beam-shooting space monsters invading Earth.
- Scenes of people standing around talking about how Earth is being attacked by space monsters.
- Scenes of people trying to hypothesize ways to save Earth from being attacked by space monsters.
- Scenes of people test-piloting experimental fighter planes that will be used to combat space monsters.
- Scenes of people tiptoeing around a sleeping space monster in order to uncover some clue that will help them find a way to save Earth from being attacked by space monsters.
- Scenes of an estranged father and daughter trying to get over their past trauma and personal differences in order to find a way to save Earth from being attacked by space monsters.
- Scenes of people describing the havoc being wreaked by space monsters you don’t actually get to see.
It’s everything you want in a movie about space monsters invading Earth that cannot actually afford to be a movie about space monsters invading Earth.
Alien Convergence runs about 86 minutes, and of that I’d reckon there’s only only about two minutes of genuine alien monster action, more or less. Maybe a bit more if you count the slumbering monster scene. Destruction scenes last micro-seconds. Aerial dogfights with the monsters are practically over before they even get started.
I hesitate to even call this Asylum outing a mockbuster. The title is clearly a play on Alien: Covenant, but the films have nothing in common outside of both movies involving alien monsters. Heck, in addition to closely cribbing the plots, in the old days, The Asylum would have their mockbusters out the week the big screen movie they were capitalizing opened in movie theaters. This one didn’t arrive on VOD / DVD until almost three weeks after. Even they seemed to be treating it as an afterthought.
Possibly because the movie proves to be old school Asylum in the worst possible way: minimal action, very limited amount of mediocre special effects, excessively talky, a general pointlessness to the entire film. Having been covering their films for so long, this felt like something they would have cranked out nearly a decade ago. The Asylum had been stepping up its efforts in recent years, but I guess with the b-movie VOD market being what it is at the moment, their non-shark/non-disaster genre offerings seem to be growing increasingly impoverished of late.
Three meteorites come crashing down to Earth, unleashing a trio of big alien monsters that looked to me like a cross between a gargoyle and the 2001 South Korean kaiju flick Yongary (or Reptilian, as it was called upon video release in the US). These winged “stargoyles” (which would have made a much better title, you ask me) shoot energy beams from their mouth a la Godzilla. They just don’t do it very much. They don’t do much of anything, to be totally honest. About as generic as movie monsters can get.
One quirk they do possess is that just looking at them proves extremely difficult for humans and can cause massive headaches doing so because of their ability to generate blurry visual distortion that makes them almost invisible, which also helps further save on the film’s already meager f/x budget.
I probably shouldn’t go into any real details about the physiology, methodology, or motivations of the alien space monsters. Not because it would prove too spoilery; since the movie is primarily nothing but talking heads talking about the alien space monsters and how to combat them, what else would be left for you to enjoy while you wait for that minute or two of monster action?
It’s kind of amazing how in a movie with only about ten primary characters, all but three of them serve little to no purpose… not even to be killed off in order to elevate the stakes. The stakes are only elevated by dialogue assuring us the situation is dire out there in the off-camera movie world. At no point does this alien menace ever come across as an actual menace because they barely get any opportunity to menace anyone.
The longer this movie went on, the more I began feeling a bit bad for the nearly impossible task the writer and director had been saddled with. I suspect they probably could have put together a halfway decent creature feature if they actually had the resources to deliver on the creature aspect – aka the whole reason we’re watching this film in the first place. Usually with movies of this nature you’re given no real vested interest to care about any of the protagonists caught up in the peril. This one goes out of its way to try to make you care about the father and daughter at the center of the story, but it’s all in service of nothing; a genuine character arc in a plot that keeps having to work around not delivering on its primary reason for existing.
I wouldn’t even call this a particularly bad movie. More of an uneventful slog with far more promise than delivery.
Oh, and take a drink every single time the lead actress informs someone she works for DARPA.
In case you’re wondering, the “Convergence” in the title gets explained when these three alien monsters that are almost never shown on screen together finally converge into one singular monster. Did this make it bigger? More powerful? To be honest, it just seemed to me that they did this to further save on the special effects during the final battle.
Between Alien Convergence and their previous mockbusters, Alien: Origins and Alien vs. Hunter, I’m prepared to state The Asylum should probably just stay away from making Alien-inspired mockbusters.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
