Andariel Halo
Something went seriously wrong with this movie, starting with the cold open. it starts with a bunch of white trash looking "militia" types with AR-15s with holo sights and very thick beards, looking like they're on a training mission in preparation for the next black president, when suddenly "something" attacks them, in a manner evocative of Predator.
Dropping a quick and early spoiler right here; this entire sequence has absolutely nothing to do with the film at all. It doesn't come back to anything, doesn't hint at anything, and it's not clear if it even takes place in the same area that the movie is set in. Nothing about it comes up later.
Then, we finally get into the actual movie, starting with a woman, Zoe, going on a hiking trip in the Appalachians. We also meet a guy who works there, named "Drake", when the boss finds out he has a criminal record and fires him. Drake handles this with the sort of maturity and restraint of a guilty child, barely clinging to his lie of "It's someone else" for 10 seconds before basically conceding it's him, then inexplicably gets into a pushing match with the boss, which equally inexplicably ends in hilarious fashion with the boss tumbling backwards over his desk, knocking over a pair of moose horns, with the moose horns spearing him through the eye and killing him.
So Drake is now panicking and has to deal with taking on Zoe and a group of others on a 10 day hike through the Appalachians. All throughout, he is emotionally manic, needlessly belligerent, and just an overall bully with everyone involved. It comes not as a surprise that he gets into a fight with the hikers, but that it took as long as it did for him to do so. They tie him down and decide to go looking for Zoe's backpack, as she brought her father's ashes with her to scatter at a mountaintop area.
Before this big fight sequence, we get a moment of them finding a dead coyote with its eyes torn out, then one of the hikers, Brian, gets a sickness around his eyes that looks similar to that. Then he suddenly gets better off-screen, then dies some time later with his eyes torn out like the coyote.Just before this, we got what was conceivably a nightmare sequence in which Zoe is wandering the woods at night, gets confronted by what is ostensibly an alien, and then wakes up in an alien-like sleeping tube, spotting Drake in a similar tube across from her. She and Drake discuss it in real life, confirming it wasn't just a dream.
Then they come across a freaky looking totem which is very much not Cherokee, while earlier one of the hikers had found a bead that looked like nothing but he kept describing as "not native American" and looking like a scarab.
At some point after Brian dies, they all just disperse, going their own way, before Zoe finds Drake again, sick in the eyes like Brian was, and they go into a cave where they find lots of tourists' baggage and Drake has a meltdown saying THEY'VE been watching us for generations, using our eyes like spy cameras. He then freaks out and tears out his own eyes and Zoe runs off and...Escapes. She scatters her father's ashes like she wanted. Inexplicably, she finds a "scarab" bead in his ashes, then she gets magically transported (or flashes back to) the alien sleeping tubes, where everyone is alive and awake and freaking out.
Then the movie just ends, having barely done anything with its concept and seemingly unaware of it. They seemed to be implying an ancient aliens connection, but it was never even indirectly hinted at. It's as though a significant portion of the film were cut out and nothing further was done to rectify it.
derekjager
This isn't a "bad" film but it just lacks a compelling plot to keep you engaged and walking. It starts out fine as we meet the characters and they start the hike, but I think there really isn't enough conflict between them to keep it interesting. Drake, the hike leader, is a little too underwritten of the characters. He has a secret--which we know--but he acts so nasty to everyone (instead of being a nice guy) that it sort of undermines the surprise of who he is.The acting across the board is fine, but I sense there was a lot of padding. At the 30 min mark, when we should be deep into the plot, it's still sort of aimless. And since not much of interest is going on, I was sort of bored. Kept watching, but even when the alien aspect was introduced, it still didn't goose the plot. Everything just settled back into the plodding narrative.It's then I checked and saw I was 55 mins into it with only about 25 mins left! So yes, it's a short film, but if they can't keep me watching an hour into it, something is missing--my interest. So I stopped and looked for something else to watch.
lynnbarr-72128
A movie that had so much potential but fell flat on it's face. The plot is never really explained, the characters are dull you really don't care what happens to them. It all points to Alien abduction, have they been spying on the human race? the movie seems to be going in that direction, but still some explanation of how and why they are here was needed, why did some humans die and others didn't after being abducted. It all seemed like a rushed script no real thought to the story, i would not recommend this movie,
