As we learned from the last time I reviewed a movie about the infamous Area 51, I know maybe a bit too much about the topic for my own good. Well thankfully for anyone afraid of another niche geek-out, 51 takes all the facts out of the mythos to make its film. Other things it takes out include realism, steady continuity and common sense, but hey, this is a SyFy movie and so we probably should just be thankful a Sharknado didn't blow through the complex halfway through the movie.
In 51, the government has decided that the best way to stop everyone speculating, poking their noses in and generally being a nuisance about what exactly is going on in Area 51 is to invite a couple of journalists in to have a look around. Of course, everything will be carefully staged for them so that they come away thinking they's seen things they shouldn't have when in fact it was all planned and they didn't manage to see the truth, and so they were probably very lucky to get two investigative journalists who believe everything they're told. One of them is Lex Luthor - sorry, Sam Whitaker, and the other is Claire Felon, who I didn't recognise from anything, but I suspect was supposed to be a pretty, liberal version of the Drudge Report. They're led around the base by Earthforce President John Sheridan - sorry, Colonel Martin, whose carefully planned whitewashing is thrown completely out of the window when one of the aliens being held captive on the base decided that that day is the day he's going to break out, and he lets out some of the other aliens to cover his escape. The journalists are trapped underground and have to try to escape with the help of a friendly alien voiced by Steven Hawking,while up top the guards have to try to stop the rampaging escaped aliens.
Ho-hum. Another Area 51 movie, another movie with some deeply dodgy production values and plot points. To begin with, every single "plot twist" or development could be seen coming a mile away - the "coward" airman was going to prove his bravery; the "fake hero" was going to become a real hero; and the government was going to have turned out to have lied to everyone including their friendly telekinetic alien friend. The Big Book of Cliches in Fiction really got thumbed through during the making of this movie, basically. There were also plot holes large enough to fly a mothership through, the most notable being near the film's climax where - SPOILERS! - the alien who waited 25 years to escape makes his way to the room where his mate was being held only to discover she'd been autopsied years ago... except her corpse is still laid out on the exam table like it only happened yesterday. Apparently as well as wildly unreliable security, Area 51 also practices some really lax biohazard protocols.
The movie also placed emphasis on the wrong threats. Yes, a shapeshifting alien is a threat, but quite frankly I was more concerned with the pair of aliens who looked like someone had jammed a xenomorph, a chupacabra and a Scyther in a blender and set it to "Roughly Chop". Certainly those two racked up a bigger bodycount than the alleged "biggest threat", and we even spent more time with the soldiers trying to stop them then we did with Sheridan, Luthor and the rest of them trying to escape and/or find the shapeshifter. Oh, and at the end of the film our survivors do that greatest of movie feats - they out-drive a nuclear explosion, although none of them were in a fridge at the time.
Credit where it's due though, the special effects for the aliens were good. Practical rather than CGI, suitably inhuman and slimy-looking - sure, they were being played by men in suits, but they were damn good suits and I'll take that over CGI pasted on a scene any day. There was also plenty of gore, primarily from the xenoScychabra's victims - also practical and served to emphasize that these aliens meant business. But in the end it was cliche-ridden, predictable and really not very good (especially the coda; what in the name of Eris was that for?) and so my quest for an actual good movie involving Area 51 or something like it continues (to be fair it's not much of a quest; I just keep picking these films up and getting disappointed).
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