What in the actual hell did I just watch?
It's 2:17 AM and my brain feels like it's been put through a cheap blender. I'm sitting here in the dark on my couch, the only light coming from the Amazon Prime "Because you watched" recommendation bar, and I'm just... baffled. I paid $4.99 to rent *Alien Expedition*. Four ninety-nine. I could have bought a fancy coffee. I could have put that toward my electric bill. Instead, I have... this. This feeling. This weird mix of "I want my 90 minutes back" and "okay, that was kind of amazing in its own terrible way."
So it starts, right? And it looks... fine. Like a video game cutscene from 2012. There are these people. In space suits. They're on a mission. An expedition, you might say. To an alien planet. Because that always goes well. The dialogue is... something else. It's like they fed every sci-fi cliche into an AI and asked it to generate a script. "Stay frosty, people." "I'm picking up a non-terrestrial signature." "We're not alone." I was physically groaning into my throw pillow.
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And then they land. And the planet is... well, it's a quarry. You can literally see the tire tracks from the trucks that are probably parked just off-screen. I paused it for a second to get a drink of water and just stared at the background. It's so obviously British Columbia or something. I half expected a mountie to ride by in the distance.
But the real magic happens when the aliens show up. Oh, the aliens. There's this scene where the team is exploring a cave system (of course there's a cave system) and the scanner tech goes all glitchy. And one of them, the cocky one who you know is going to die first, he's like, "It's probably just a magnetic anomaly." And then this THING drops from the ceiling. I literally JUMPED. Not a big jump, but a full-body flinch. My knee slammed into my laptop and now there's a weird line on the screen. Great. Thanks, movie.
But the alien design... I can't. It's stuck in my head. It was like a cross between a spider and a lobster and a guy in a rubber suit. Which it probably was. But the best part, the part that is now seared into my soul, were its eyes. They were these two, perfectly round, googley eyes. Like the kind you buy at a craft store and glue onto a popsicle stick. Here's this terrifying, drooling, multi-limbed killing machine... and it has the eyes of a children's art project. Every time it was on screen, I was torn between screaming with laughter and screaming with terror. I don't think that's the emotion they were going for.
All that darkness and those googley eyes... it reminded me of this one time when I was a kid, maybe seven or eight. I had this nightmare about a monster living in my closet. I was convinced it was there. I could hear it breathing. My dad, trying to be helpful, gave me a flashlight and told me to go look. So I crept over, heart pounding, and flung open the door... and there, hanging right in my face, was one of my mom's old coats. The buttons on it were these big, shiny, plastic circles that caught the flashlight beam and looked just like eyes. I screamed so loud I think the neighbors heard me. Anyway, the alien in this movie was basically that coat, but with more drool.
Honestly, I thought I hated it. For the first hour, I was just riffing on it. Making jokes. Live-tweeting it in my head. But then something shifted. Maybe it was sleep deprivation. Maybe it was the sheer, unadulterated commitment to the bit. The movie never winks at you. It plays its ridiculous, googley-eyed heart out with 100% sincerity. And by the end, when the grizzled commander was facing off against the alien queen (who, I assume, had even larger googley eyes), I was leaning forward. I was invested. I was on the edge of my damn couch.
And then the ending happened. The hero makes this heroic sacrifice, setting off a chain reaction to blow up the alien hive and save the remaining crew. It's slow-motion, fire everywhere, he's screaming as the planet crumbles around him. And in the moment, I was like, "YES! WHAT A MAN! A TRUE HERO!" But now that I'm sitting here, the credits rolling to some generic synth-rock, I'm thinking... wait. How did he rig that explosion with a flare gun and a rock? Why did blowing up the hive cause the entire planet to become unstable? That's... not how geology works. Or astrophysics. Or anything. Was that actually kind of dumb? I don't know. My sleep-deprived brain thought it was Oscar-worthy ten minutes ago. Now it feels like something a ten-year-old would write. I'm so confused.
The whole rental experience was just... weird. I'm on my couch, in my most comfortable pajamas, wrapped in a blanket, watching this movie that clearly cost about as much as my car. The contrast is jarring. Every so often, a little notification would pop up on my phone, completely breaking the tension. "Your food delivery has arrived." "Sarah liked your photo." Meanwhile, people are being melted by acid spit on a quarry-planet. It's a very 21st-century way to watch a movie.
I don't know. I'm conflicted. It's a bad movie. Objectively. The writing is terrible, the effects are cheap, the acting is... present. But it has a soul. A weird, googley-eyed, rubber-suited soul. It tried so hard. And I kind of respect that. I think. Maybe I'm just too tired to think straight. I need to go watch a video of a cat falling off a chair to reset my brain.
Whatever. It's done.
4/10 - meh
- alex