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Reviews
Dark Encounter (2019)
I wish I hadn't watched it.
I watched 'Dark Encounter' on a whim, knowing little about it. I love low-budget sci-fi with ambitious themes - Coherence, Cosmos, The Vast of Night, Primer. So I was prepared to love this. I didn't.
Firstly, and most importantly, a warning: I assumed this was a movie about alien encounters. It's not. It has aliens in it, but it's a movie about the disappearance of an 8-year-old girl, and it's a dark, disturbing story with no happy ending. I was shocked by the turn the story took, and I actually wouldn't have watched it had I known.
Secondly, the film itself is not well made. I realised almost immediately that I was watching a movie featuring British actors in a British landscape. Why on earth did they set it in Pennsylvania? The accents ranged from "Foghorn Leghorn" to "Woody from Toy Story" ("THERE'S A SNAKE IN MY BOOT!") and the costumes were clichéd (plaid shirts and cowboy boots). Most of the performances would have been much more convincing if they'd been permitted to speak with British accents, and the same story transported to North Yorkshire would have needed few changes.
The plot, which moves at a glacial pace, is pretty sparse. It's 15 minutes before anything even happens, and when it does, it's 50 minutes of jump scares, coloured lights, smoke machines, and people standing around gawping. There's little dialogue, except of the "they're in the basement!" variety, and the actors have clearly been directed to simply stand there with their mouths open as wide as possible most of the time. Mel Raido is particularly guilty of this, and in fact he hams it up in most of his scenes, sobbing hysterically and sinking to the floor while everyone else is standing around waiting for something to happen.
The film makes very heavy use of slow motion and an overbearing, melodramatic score, to the extent that the final third of the move is almost exclusively music and slow-mo. And though the CGI when it comes to actual extra-terrestrial stuff is better than expected for such a small budget, the story doesn't support it. It makes no sense whatsoever that aliens from several galaxies away would intervene to solve this one case of a missing American child and not the 800,000 similar cases in the US alone each year.
Nor does it make sense that they went about it in the terrifying, cataclysmic way they did. Why come all this way and freak out the inhabitants of a small town when they could have just sent the sheriff and email explaining what happened to the missing kid and pointing him in the direction of the necessary evidence? Were they just on an intergalactic grocery run? How did they know what happened anyway? Are they omniscient? Can they help us with stuff like global warming and COVID-19, or do they only investigate unsolved crimes?
The writers make no attempt to explain any of this, and you really have to be satisfied with bright lights and spooky noises in the attic to enjoy the movie. If that's enough for you, then you're probably one of the handful of people who have given 'Dark Encounters' 10 stars.
Cosmos (2019)
Gobsmacked.
I knew nothing whatsoever about this movie, I just thought it looked interesting. I had no idea it was a low budget (no budget?) film until I read up on it after watching. The idea that anyone could make a sci-fi movie about outer space with no money is absolutely preposterous, but it worked, due to a simple concept, a solid script, a hard-working team and some very creative workarounds.
Most of the film takes place inside a cramped car, either driving or parked in the woods at night, with some outdoor scenes in the woods. The claustrophobia of the set is offset by video and audio of outer space on a computer in the car, and characters gazing up at the night sky. It's surprisingly effective, and vastly increases the scale of the story. We follow a satellite across the sky on the computer screen, and then Roy - who has a personal connection to that very satellite - scrambles out of the car and walks into the woods to watch it with the naked eye. When the satellite briefly vanishes from view on Mike's computer screen, the significance is immediately obvious to even the uninitiated.
Some of the reviews have critiqued the pace. There were a couple of points where the momentum slowed, and those scenes could benefit from tighter editing. But everything in the script is there for a reason, and I enjoyed the character development. The slower moments, the poignant moments, and the lighter moments actually helped build the tension for me. Without giving too much away, Mike first picks up something of interest at the 19 minute mark, so there's not long to wait, and we really need to know who these guys are to understand why they should absolutely be the first ones on the planet to make this discovery. The revelation itself is handled in a way which, without little green men and flying saucers, is both visually striking and breathtaking in a cerebral way.
There wasn't a moment when the visuals faltered, or I felt I was watching something filmed indoors. The soundtrack was so impressive I assumed it must have been one of the more expensive aspects of the film, but the 'making of' feature available online suggests otherwise. The whole production is seamless, and the acting is first rate, even though the actors themselves seem to have been paid in sandwiches.
This film reminded me in a lot of points of great space-related movies like Contact, Apollo 13 and Gravity. Early on, watching these three guys hurtling through the dark in a brightly-lit car jammed with equipment, it felt like a cramped spacecraft, and the Weaver brothers exploit this allusion to give their film the feel of a classic space movie on a shoestring budget.
It also plays on emotions all of us are familiar with to create tension. Most of us have no idea what it's like to be an aeronautical engineer, and little-to-no technical knowledge about the subject of this film. But we can all relate to computers crashing, batteries dying, the need to get somewhere fast, looking up at the stars and feeling small, doing something clever and feeling great.
Ultimately the best thing I can say about this movie is that I enjoyed every minute of it and didn't want it to end.