I was wrong. It was a good conspiracy theory movie with a good dark comedy aspect as well. There's a big, huge, gaping, yawning difference between comedy and dark comedy. Good dark comedies are difficult to come by these days. It seems like they stopped writing those in the 90s. Maybe this is the return of them?
On one side we have the conspiracy theory guy and his cousin, on the other we have a high-powered executive going about her life. Yup. The conspiracy theory guy believes the high-powered executive is an alien and not one from a different country. An actual honest-to-goodness outer space alien.
I'm going to abbreviate going forward since there's a lot of words I don't want to have to keep typing them. Yes. I know I could abbreviate then search-and-replace but then I'd have to read the whole thing over to make sure it didn't replace things I didn't want replaced.
CG - Conspiracy guy
CGC - Conspiracy guy's cousin
HPE - High-powered executive
The CG is positive that his research shows that the ship from Andromeda will arrive in four days during the lunar eclipse. He's also positive that the HPE is from Andromeda and can get him a meeting with the royals on the ship to try to save earth.
CG is positive that the planet can only be saved with outside intervention. He plans on asking the Andromedans (nicely) to give that help. But first he needs to find one and have them bring him to the ship. The two live out in the county in a typical Midwestern style house and keep bees. They're big on the bees as an analogy for how life intersects, etc.
CGC is neurodiverse. He follows his cousin but isn't as on board with the alien theory. So he's asking questions about whether things are right or not, etc. Fun note - the actor who plays this character is also neurodiverse. He's also got great hair.
The HPE lives in a fancy modern house, does fancy rich person things, has a fancy new black SUV, and wears a fancy black suit (and black Louboutin shoes as demonstrated by a shot from behind as she walks, showing those famous red soles). She's got the big office with glass walls and there's a bit where she's telling her employees to leave on time unless they really have to stay late but she'd prefer if they leave on time unless they have work they want to complete. It's quite the rollercoaster of work-life balance talk.
The two of them come up with a plan to kidnap the HPE. The CG gives his cousin a shot to chemically neuter him (doesn't really, pretends to do it (I think)) so they're both immune to the physical wiles of the HPE, who's female. They also get a lot of an antihistamine cream, which is supposed to protect them as well. There's a lot of details in this movie that it's easy to forget some.
They plan it out and succeed in kidnapping the HPE. She puts up a darn good fight but ends up unconscious in her own SUV. The CGC is given the task of shaving her head, because the CG says they communicate with the ship through their hair. Big props to the actress because they did shave her head for real in that shot.
When they get her back to their house they put her in the basement, chain her down, and slather her exposed skin with the cream. No liberties are taken! Exposed means outside of clothing. The lotion streaks show and were part of what made one of the trailers interesting because it makes her skin look not quite human.
When she wakes up they tell her why they kidnapped her, as stated above. They want to use her to get onto the ship. She does a very good job of using all the negotiating and active listening techniques used in the corporate world to try to get them to let her go. Spoiler - they don't.
The day divisions are placecards showing the earth and counting down the days to the lunar eclipse. More on that later in the review.
The movie quickly skips over time so as not to get repetitive. It comes out that CG's mother is gone and there's a couple of times they show her floating like a balloon. CGC continues to ask questions. HPE is cooperating more in putting on the lotion herself.
CG has created equipment to determine if a person is an Andromedan or not. It's a jury rig that includes electrical pads. He straps her in, twists the dial, and watches the readouts. He keeps turning the dial and watching. He keeps turning the dial and watching. The house lights flicker. CGC rips the pads off, saying that he's going to kill her. The monitoring equipment shows a whole lotta things in red by this time.
CG gets all kinds of apologetic because according to his readings she's part of the Imperial Court. He's seriously apologizing. But he doesn't let her go. Back into the basement as he figures out what to do. He's continuing to ask questions. But when he brought the HPE out of the basement to have a meal (suitably chained to the floor, as is her chair) he gave her a dress, with a name on the dress tag.
HPE puts some things together and remembers that CG's mom was part of a medical drug trial gone bad. There's a flashback to the settlement meeting and now we know that CG's mom is still around, just in a coma. Just. I know. But she's not dead, as it was rather implied.
Oof. Lots going on. Let's keep reviewing. This movie is following a fairly common conspiracy theory theme and there's dark comedy in the whole setup and execution of the plans. It's good.
CGC is getting increasingly bothered about the situation. The lunar eclipse is getting closer and CGC wants to go with the aliens. He wants to go away. CG rather dismisses that and talks around the situation, saying that of course he'll take his cousin with him when they go to the ship but the whole point is to fix earth and live there.
(There's a minor subplot with a police officer who used to babysit CG and still feels bad about something he did during that time, wants to make sure he's doing all right without his mother around, and ends up getting a shovel to the face multiple times later. It's not really part of the main plot but it's there so it's here.)
Every time CG goes into the basement to talk to HPE he has CGC hold a rifle on her. CG is getting more and more upset that HPE won't admit she's an alien. To be fair she does give in and say so but it's patently obvious she's trying another technique to get free. The lunar eclipse is almost happening.
Now I remember (thanks to Wikipedia) the purpose of the police officer-shovel interaction. It gets CG out of the house.
During that time CG is gone CGC goes into the basement to talk to HPE and finally asks her to take him away, that he wants to go away. She agrees that she will. CGC then puts the rifle under his chin and pulls the trigger. Oof. Didn't expect that one.
HPE is able to get the keyring from CGC's pocket and unlock herself. While searching for a way out she finds CG's lab. The lab has a lot of dissected bodies and notebooks. Oddly enough HPE doesn't run out screaming. She takes the time to read those notebooks.
CG comes back into the basement to find his cousin and HPE walking free. HPE uses CG's distress at everything falling apart to tell him there's a cure for his mother in her car. It's hiding in a bottle marked antifreeze. All he has to do is give it to her. He believes her, does it, and watches the predictable result of putting antifreeze into someone's IV bag. He's quite upset, as could be imagined.
HPE reveals she really is an Andromedan and details what they've been doing with earth since the age of dinosaurs. She's got that same air of control she tried to give in the beginning but now it's solid. It's a Christopher Reeves Clark Kent/Superman kind of change. She asks how many Andromedans he's found. He said two. She agrees to take him to the ship. All right then. The day of the lunar eclipse is upon us.
She drives him to her office (at gunpoint), wearing her rather wrinkled suit (she'd changed into a bathrobe for most of her time in the basement) and a wig he'd offered her earlier. She's got that panicked expression and body language as she takes him to her office. Various employees are surprised and glad to see her after her disappearance. She goes into her office, closes the drapes, and pulls out a wooden box that holds the control for the transporter in her office closet. The control is a calculator. When he questions that she tells him it has to look inconspicuous. Fair.
While she's "trying to remember the 58 number sequence" CG shows her that he's wearing a suicide bomber vest, just to make sure she doesn't try anything funny. This does not help her with trying to "remember the number".
She finally gets it, he has to go first since she's got the control, and he gets himself in the closet. The closet holds a couple more identical black suits, another pair of shoes, etc. He closes the door, she presses a key, there's a flash, and his bomb detonates. In true dark comedy fashion she's hit in the head with his head as it flies across the room.
She wakes up in an ambulance with a neck brace and tells them to take her back. Of course they refuse. She gets up, rips off the brace, and runs very fast back to the office. When she gets there she takes the control, gets into the closet, and there's a flash.
Before I continue I want to talk about the time reference place cards. The interesting thing to note is that the closer it gets to the day of the lunar eclipse the more the earth goes from round to flat. By the last card it's full on flat earth with oceans flowing over the sides.
Next we see her rising out a pool of goo, with people in very bulky knitted jumpsuits helping her out. They're not speaking English. They say they couldn't contact her because they'd cut off her hair. Turns out she's the Empress and they've been experimenting on various people from earth, with no success for the future. She decides, while wearing a bulk knitted beehive beanie, to end the experiment and pops the bubble over a model of the flat earth.
The movie closes with scenes of dead people everywhere. They just dropped where they were, whatever they were doing. Guess that pesky problem of people destroying earth got settled after all.
Enough about what happened in the movie. Time for some observations.
I liked this movie. I felt it started to drag a little during the "tell me you're an alien" repetition but it wasn't enough to draw the movie down. When she said she was Andromedan it all made more sense. When she was admitting to being an alien she never said Andromedan, as he demanded she do. She just said "OK. I'm an alien!" in hopes of being let go. She said it after getting free and reading his notes.
The movie had dark comedy moments scattered throughout like treats and tidbits. The set was exactly what you'd expect to see in a family home, right down to the random stuff in the basement and the fire pit outside. That normality contrasted with the perceived absurdity of what was going on.
CG listens to conspiracy podcasts while riding his bicycle throughout the movie. He's got things he worked up at home, including what he says the Andromedan ship looks like. He made that detector, that turns out to darn well work. He's been hunting, and finding, Andromedans to refine everything.
That switch from conspiracy theory to "he was right!" is sudden and rather unexpected. The whole movie leads you down the rabbit hole but you don't expect to find the rabbit. In the transporter scene you see a yellow flash before the bomb goes off. When she uses it, there's a yellow flash. Either she knew the bomb would detonate or she was honestly going to take him to the ship we won't know. But she did activate it, as she said she would.
My movie buddy is a big fan of this director and knew what kind of twists they put into their films. He said he envied me going in cold so I could experience everything as it happened. I'm not sure I want to dig into the director's film library or not. I enjoyed this but I don't know if it's completely to my taste ongoing.
The character development was good all around. The CG is suitably unhinged. The CGC is suitably pulled along for the ride. The HPE is suitably scared for her life, until she's not. The whole movie pivots when the CG comes back after killing his mother and finds an actual real royal Andromedan in his basement, and she's asking the questions now.
I can't really nitpick anything except that bit of drag about halfway through the movie and what seems to be the pointless story with the police officer. It might have been for exposition. They never say what the police officer did while he was babysitting so that one is left up to the imagination. I still say having him in the movie was for the sole reason of having him ask if they'd seen her car since they were near-ish and on a main-ish road, and to get killed when he hears the gunshot when CGC does his thing to himself.
This isn't at all subtle when it comes to being about climate change and all that stuff. The bee decline is real so by having them have hives the discussion flowed naturally into that and how people have that same hive instinct that makes them easy to control. That was one of the things CG accused the HGE of during a basement discussion/rant.
I don't need to watch it again. It was good. It wasn't great. It doesn't have rewatchability since I know the twist ending. That's a problem with twist endings. Once you know there's a twist, the only reason to watch the movie again is to see if there were clues to the twist you missed. I'm not interested enough to look for things I might have missed because I think I got the two big clues - her saying Andromedan only after finding the experiments and her truly using the transporter on CG.
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