spectral

[IMDB]

the first half of this movie--i am using the term loosely--is a blatant ripoff of aliens.  they even stole the panicked first contact and flight in an armoured truck scene. the second half fell down hard as the writer struggled to provide an explanation for the phenomenon, and the resolution was pure bullshit. i figure that somebody told them they were ripping off aliens, so they rewrote the second half of the movie to be a completely different thing. i imagine a writer waving a sheaf of papers in the director's face, screaming "SEE? NOT ALIENS!" before stomping off to continue work on their new script for a movie called "prism", a film which is strangely reminiscent of cube.

man, remember cube? too gory for me, but i enjoyed it nonetheless. hypercube was utter nonsense, but i really liked where they went with cube zero.

anyway, of all the things i can think of to do with a plentiful weapons research budget, none of them include creating autonomous, nondiscriminating killing machines. even if this was a thing you were planning to airdrop onto a planet you did not have any interest in inhabiting, it just seems likely to result in, i dunno, EXTINCTION? how about a nice gun or something?

spectral gets one nice gun or something. i ripped off my own review to come up with that.