I was a precocious child growing up, with some bizarre interests. From the age of seven, for example, I was fascinated by the subject of UFOs, and read just about anything I could get my hands on to do with the subject (in hindsight, the electrogravimetrics book when I was 11 was maybe a little too advanced for me). And I believed in this stuff, too. Well, most of it, at any rate. Thankfully, as I got older I developed some critical thinking skills and came to the conclusion that there probably wasn't a conga line of alien spacecraft waiting to abduct unsuspecting people for probing... but the knowledge remained with me (plus I still read up on the subject, just from a more scientific point of view). Which is why Area 51 had me grinding my teeth in frustration at numerous points throughout the movie.
Three friends - Reid, Darrin and Ben - set off on a road trip to break into the notorious Area 51 in Nevada. This whole endeavour is the brainchild of Reid, who had a strange missing time/abduction-type experience at a party several months previously and has become obsessed with UFOs, aliens and the eponymous Dreamland ever since. Of the other two, Darrin just wants to film inside Area 51 and Ben is there as the designated driver and skeptical-but-loyal friend. They're also joined by a young woman named Jelena, whose father allegedly worked at Area 51 and made maps of the underground facilities (and who may have been killed for it) who Reid met online. Armed with signal jammers, handheld and clipon cameras and freon suits (all apparently available online, no questions asked) they succeed in breaking into one of the allegedly most-heavily guarded military facilities in the US, if not the world and head down into the sub-sub basements looking for answers. Of course, the things they discover end up posing more questions than answering them, and inevitably they end up straying somewhere they shouldn't and getting chased by both soldiers and other creatures...
Area 51, unfortunately, had two strikes against it when it was released. The first is that, although it was made in around 2009, it was shelved until this year for endless reshootings, post-production fiddling and rewrites, which are really obvious when watching the film now. The second is a more personal one for me - the poster proudly announces that Area 51 is from "the director of Paranormal Activity and the producer of The Purge", and saying something like that is just guaranteed to make me start twitching uncontrollably.
The biggest problem of Area 51 is that it's just not scary - a pretty big problem for a purported sci-fi horror film. Even when our plucky protagonists are fleeing for their lives through underground caves which may or may not be home to angry alien hybrids, we don't feel any real terror or anxiety for them. This is partly because of the general unlikableness of the majority of found-footage protagonists (the character I felt the most attachment to, Ben, spent most of the movie off-camera, sitting waiting in the car), but also because we can barely see anything. This is mainly because, in true found-footage fashion, it's all shaky-cam, night vision and/or infra-red vision that's rarely pointing in the direction of whatever alien or monster is menacing them (however, if you're a sufferer of florasicalasticphobia, then prepare to wet yourself) - but I think director Oran Peli must have looked at his previous film and thought, "I show too much of the demon in this film. Better cut it back in this one." Although that could just as easily have been all the post-production meddling.
Large parts of the movie also just make no sense. I've talked about suspension of belief before, but it's stretched to new breaking points here, where people can buy military-grade signal jammers and freon suits that can beat infra-red sensors online with no questions asked, and then use them to smoothly break into, as I said, one of the supposedly most heavily guarded military installations in the US. By the time it gets to the end, it's just laughable. And let's not get into the questions of, once again, who edited all this footage together, complete with vox pops with our protagonists' friends and family, all so very sad about how they've all disappeared without a trace. Are we to believe that the aliens, for lack of anything else to do, got busy with Sony Vegas Pro one weekend?
Maybe the worst thing about it though, to me at least, is the wasted potential. There are moments in the film where I can see how things could have gone so much better, or that might have once been there but got cut out in the years of post-production meddling. There's one scene, for example, where the protagonists go through a hangar where an old, battered plane sits, marked with the number 19. Now this might have just been me jumping to conclusions, but my mind immediately went to the infamous Flight 19 of Bermuda Triange fame (told you I was a nerd for UFO stuff) and if that had been expanded on, even a little bit, then it would have been pretty awesome and impressive. But no, nothing is said and so it just remains a quasi-Easter egg for people like me, who were allowed to read far too many strange books as a child.
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