October 2nd: Lunopolis (2010, Netflix Streaming)

What to say about this?  I just don't know.  I was expecting something more of an Alien meets Enemy of the State.  It was far from.

This film presents itself as a documentary made in 1990 out of footage found that was shot by the people who are in the film.  Anachronisms aside, I couldn't buy into it.

The film has a REALLY cool over arching concept that is very promising until you reach act two and everything starts becoming about a terribly named analogy of Scientology called "Lunarology."  And it gets even worse when they start talking about time travel and changed timelines.

All of the horror and scare that takes place in this film is in the first twenty minutes.  After that it's mostly "Men in Black" acting like thugs and two film makers filming everything they saw.  The downward spiral of the protagonists' psyches was very ineffective as far as story telling goes and the motivation they give early on is "it's just weird, we want to see what it is."

One of the biggest downfalls about this film is it's story telling technique.  It fails to tell a story through action and film and rather relies heavily on exposition.  Everything about the story in the movie is exposition.  I understand that telling story via a found footage movie is difficult, but Oren Pelli has been doing it for a decade now without the use of overly long exposition.  This movie is five years old, so the film makers had five years to learn.  The big ten or twenty minute exposition in the middle of the film that explained everything spelled EVERYTHING out in a monologue by an old man.  I lost interest about halfway through the monologue.

Overall, I call this one a pass.  And hard, at that.  It was was not worth the time and effort to watch it, which is a shame.  It had a REALLY great and original idea and just failed to deliver.  I don't regret watching it, but if I could have those two hours back, I would take them.  I chose the particular cover that I did because it gives the film a benefit on the doubt with all those accolades.  And, yes, that is a flying Dodge Charger covered by some of those accolades.  (The cover I previously posted had a series of accolade plastered all over it, but I had to pull it down due to copyright issues,  The new one is the original cover.)