REVIEW: Extinction (2018)

Run Time: 90 Mins
Rated: R
What To Expect: SyFy-tier trash, but without the flippant awareness

Another weekend, another turd that Netflix has pulled out of someone’s dumpster and is trying to fish for rentals with.  Two weekends ago, it was How It Ends, a movie that demoralized me so much I couldn’t even write a review for it.  One weekend ago it was Father of the Year, a film so wretched I couldn’t even get past the eight minute mark.  This time around, Netflix has been searching Universal’s trash heap and pulled out Extinction.

So, Michael Peña has been having these vivid nightmares that something awful is about to happen.  Most think he needs counselling, but he’s foreseeing the alien invasion that’s about to happen.  So we start not just with a cliché, but one that is both badly acted and badly written.  After the aliens show up and start trashing the CGI buildings with their badly rendered CGI ships, Peña is able to guide his family to somewhat safer waters, he had a vision or two, see.  But it turns out these may not even be aliens after all.

The film drags us down that route that is always bad news for a VOD film – the aspiring intellectual twist.  Worse, with another one or two thrown on top of it.  The problem is that the twists are neither intriguing nor intelligent, if they were, Universal would’ve tried to package this as some type of response to Arrival, not sell it off to the used car lot of entertainment.  End result, a hot mess that few will finish (unless they’re doing it to write a review on a website).  Even the props in the film look terrible, the alien gun that Peña uses looks like cereal boxes glued together and sprayed matte black.

There’s something else that I want to complain about.  It’s the current year, yet still some directors haven’t gotten the memo that nobody wants to look at shaking cameras and crazed editing.  The action scenes in this movie are at best totally useless, at worst, infuriating.  Unintelligible would be a generous way of putting it.  I mean that too, think of the worst shaking/editing, then realize that most of it is filmed in the dark.  Like I said, unintelligible, infuriating.

Avoid this VODmit.