Extinction: Movie Review

Image Credit: Netflix

So, it can be difficult to find the time to sit down and read a good book. So this week, I decided to review a movie I’ve been curious about for a while now; the Netflix original Extinction. Now, the only reason I was even remotely interested in this film was because it has Michael Peña (Ant Man) in it, and he’s currently one of my favorite actors. Nevertheless, I had a nagging suspicion that I wasn’t going to like this movie, but I decided to give it a go.

Peña plays a family man named Peter, who leads something of a normal life. He works at a factory for his boss, David, who is played by Mike Colter of Luke Cage fame. But Peter begins having dreams of what appear to be some sort of attack by extraterrestrial forces. He becomes distracted and unfocused, and starts to wonder if there are dark forces at work. But suddenly, the aliens do show up, and begin murdering everyone in sight, forcing Peter to fight for his family’s survival.

So, this probably sounds like pretty standard stuff for a sci-fi movie, and that’s because it is. But the plot only gets weirder from there, because this movie has decided to mash up every sci-fi trope and gimmick that Hollywood has dreamed up over the past fifty years and stick them all together into one disjointed, confusing plot. This isn’t helped by the terrible dialogue that even Peña’s considerable talent can’t manage to save. His wife (Alice), played by Lizzie Kaplan (Cloverfield), does the movie no favors. Kaplan makes an effort to redeem an incredibly tropey role as the scared wife, but it's a pretty poor one. Which, to be fair, is all this movie deserved.

It’s clear that Peña, Kaplan, and Colter were chosen for this movie because the studio hoped that they would get people to watch it. They’re candy being dangled in front of potential viewers, and nothing more. Their salary seems to have taken a fairly substantial chunk out of the budget, because the special effects in this movie seem to be pretty cheap. The aliens have costumes that look like they were taken from the set of a 50’s sci-fi movie.

And what’s worse than a bad movie? A bad movie that is trying to make a point, and making it badly. And boy oh boy, is this movie ever trying to make a point.

It’s not like the point that this movie is trying to make is inherently bad; it essentially boils down to “racism is bad” and “we shouldn’t hate people for things that happened before we were born.” But the movie goes about it in a clumsy way, and is about as subtle as Kanye West at the VMAs. There’s some very Trumpy-rhetoric that goes around, and there’s a direct reference to Charlottsville at the end. The movie gives what attempts to be an uplifting message at the end, but its ultimately botched and overshadowed by the movie’s glaring flaws.

Avoid this movie, even if you’re a Peña fan, because a talented cast can only go so far to save a terrible film. Between the horrible and tropey writing, the 90’s era CGI, and the cringeworthy dialogue, there is nothing about this movie to make it worth watching — other than some fairly solid action sequences. So give it a skip.

1/5 stars