Category: Science Fiction

An attempt to do a big science fiction war movie. For Australia, it's very ambitious.

What works: Special effects and explosive squibs are competent. The actors are mostly good, though the hero's a doofus. I didn't hate anyone or anything, though it falls far short of respect.

What doesn't: Almost everything else. It's like the writer saw Independence Day, but didn't have the skill to produce all the intertwined plots, and really didn't have the budget, so it's just the grubby resistance in a single forest. Despite a high female cast, I'm not sure it ever passes the Bechdel test; a male character calls the female Army leader a ball-buster, and Strine misogyny isn't subtle throughout. There are several Asian characters who are treated well, but rather blatantly no Aborigines, who you'd expect would survive well in this environment; but they may be on the side of the invaders since the white fuckers are finally getting what's coming to them.

15 minutes of Australian hooligans doing road work, dating, and playing sportsball, before spaceships with searchlights fly over and shoot up everything. Yee-haw. Then alien infantry who look just like Humans in armor march around with plastic toy rifles shooting buildings. They're completely inaccurate, which is weird for beings that can cross interstellar distances. A dozen local idiots, the protagonists, escape in a camper van, which should be an obvious target for the aliens, but they never seem to be able to hit it. Finally the Strine Air Force manage to shoot an alien down, which again seems implausible for advanced aliens.

There's some ludicrously dramatic "pose as a team" scenes, and a lot of whining and sniping at each other, I think intended to make them feel like a team coming together.

The alien infantry don't have thermal sensors, and are all but blind, they just walk past people hiding in tin shacks and under blankets like children. The armor isn't totally useless, for once, but their guns aren't security-locked, so any monkey can grab one and shoot it. They walk into hostile-occupied buildings and just wander around alone so a group of monkeys can overwhelm them. These idiots are incompetent. The US military is better equipped and trained.

What follows is a training and war montage based on Ewoks vs Stormtroopers, except the Stormtroopers here are even worse idiots. And the Ewoks are so dumb they throw phones containing explosive batteries into a fire (but the filmmakers don't understand the consequences).

The Strine military finally shows up again, which ends the insurgency. I don't believe any of these people could have survived, the military doesn't know how to hide, and does stupid standup fights. While the aliens have shown no cunning or skill, they have apparently endless forces and better weapons.

Of course there's an explanation at last, and it's stupid: The aliens devastated their planet, and we're polluters, so they'll take Earth. But if they already have interstellar ships, they don't need planets, and anyway could've just bought Australia for a few spaceships.

The happy ending is so out of place and not how things work, I dunno what the writer was on.

I'm not unamused by the film, but it's a trainwreck.

★★½☆☆

This is hard to talk about without spoilers, but I'll be vague enough to be useless without watching. Go watch it first, if you liked S1-2.

Every ep is resolving something from S1-2, there's almost no "new missions" as such. Everything has gone very wrong with the Faction taking over people, but that's more or less cleaned up, all the bystanders get mind-wiped and mostly don't recover their memories initially… But there's now Traveler conspiracy/support groups meeting. The boy from S1E3 returns, and I don't think a day of hanging out with a cop is gonna make a sociopath not 'path. Amanda Tapping as 001 returns, briefly, but then she's someone else again.

An AI that's been utterly useless so far gets upgraded, and the messengers aren't as safe as previously thought. Philip and the historians get a showcase episode, which mostly involves interrogating a dead man. The Trevor episode is somewhat annoying: If consciousness transfer works the way it has been described, the problem described can't happen, he'd be in a nice fresh brain every time.

In the only actual two-episode plot of the season, nuclear terrorism and data archives in the silliest possible storage medium, and a Wrath of Khan type ending for someone.

Protocol Omega somewhat contradicts previous explanations of how the Traveler program works, but some of the pieces from the season are assembled to get a hard reset.

I dunno if they're going to do a season 4. They sort of pushed parts together for it, and the last scene with Marcy & David suggests someone made changes already. But I could see them dropping it now and it's at some kind of a stopping point. I don't want another season like this, I want more of S1-S2 when it had plots.

★★★½☆

What I'm Watching: Extinction

Extraordinarily dull first 20 minutes of a working stiff having bad dreams of war against space invaders. Then a pretty solid chase/urban combat arc. Then the plot flips, which I did not see coming, a rare pleasure.

Go watch this on Netflix and come back so we can talk about it.

SPOILERS: Please see the movie first. So copy this text and view it in advanced rot13 encryption

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But the reveal and resolution is great, this is a perfectly fine actual-science fiction movie.

★★★★½