Extinction (2018)

Just one idea, with more holes than Swiss cheese.

I really like good alien invasion movies, but there are so few good ones that I'm expecting very little when a new one comes along, and once again, that caution has served me well for Extinction.  The premise is that our hero Peter (Michael Peña) is having nightmare visions of an alien invasion that are driving him mad and worrying his family, friends and work colleagues. Before long though, his nightmares come true as alien invaders storm the city and he is forced to fight to save his family.

Spoilers Ahead! If you haven't seen the movie, or don't care, don't read beyond this point. You have been warned!

There was a lot I didn't like about the first hour of this movie. The characters are two dimensional and cliched - the overworked father, the troubled teenage daughter, the cute younger daughter, and the attractive wife who may or may not be thinking of leaving all living in an apartment they couldn't possibly afford. Then there are the people, they're all good-looking, slim and happy. I got annoyed there was no indication of a date, though it seemed apparent this was some time in the future (the movie had to insert the obligatory useless holographic display presentation). The actual attack was impressive, but it wasn't long before I was fairly certain that the "aliens" were human beings, not a huge leap given that we'd seen they were our size and shape with five fingers in the trailer, so when the helmet came off just approaching the hour mark, it wasn't looking good.

Then comes the twist, and it changes everything. Alice, Peter's wife (Lizzy Caplan) gets shot and is taken by medics at the factory where Peter works, which we now see is some form of resistance HQ. In a neatly understated scene, it's revealed that Alice is a synthetic human and that Peter is as well. Over the next few minutes, as Peter "recharges" Alice, we're given a fairly substantial montage of memories that explain synths (yes, they really do call them synths) fought the humans and won, with the remaining human population evacuating the Earth for Mars, leaving the synths to rebuild the world. The synths have their memories altered so they think they're real people and they've lived this way - unaging - for 50 years.

On reflection, this makes the first hour of the movie make a lot more sense and I was suitably impressed. The characters are two-dimensional because they're synths, the apartment isn't theirs, they just appropriated it after the war, everyone is fit and good-looking because they're robots and the "aliens" are humans because, well, they are. Peter's nightmares are not prophecies, they're memories. So, as the hero synths flee the city for their "underground base", I was thinking "hey, this could be a decent movie after all", but then I thought some more.

So let's get this straight. At some point in the future we develop perfect human synthetics, we try to wipe them out by military force, they turn on us, win the war and everyone on Earth evacuates. How would that work? Well, it really wouldn't.

We see in the movie itself that the synths are not superbeings - they can be killed with gunfire just as easily as humans - so unless they had overwhelming numbers, and a heck of a lot of them had military training and access to weaponry, it's hard to see how they won the war.

How did the synths live for 50 years, thinking they were human, without ever wondering why they weren't getting older, and why their kids were still kids, and why no one ever gets sick? OK, you can replace memories, but how would that work with friends, work colleagues, famous figures, etc?

Why did the humans try to remove them by force? Couldn't they have been infected with a virus, reprogrammed, or simply shut down? We see in the movie that they're electrically powered, so a decent EMP could surely take them all out in a given area, couldn't it?

How did every country, every human agree to this "synthocide"? Sure, there'd be a lot of people in favour of it, but I'd struggle to see the balance being much more than 50/50 and the attack on the synths would have to have been precisely co-ordinated worldwide. There's absolutely no chance of that happening.

Is every human either dead or evacuated? We see a flashback that implies every human in the city is dead or gone, and a shot of ships leaving the atmosphere. Were there no sympathisers? What about humans that didn't fight or those that supported the synths? This is just as unbelievable as the attack on the synths itself. Somehow, at least 10 billion humans have either been killed or shipped off-planet (what happened in countries without spaceports?). No.

Some synths apparently retained their memories in order to prepare. In the same post-fight city scene mentioned above, we hear someone (possibly Peter's boss (Mike Colter)), say "they'll be back". They've had fifty years to prepare but when the attack comes it's a complete surprise, and their weapon stocks appear to fit in the back of a small SUV. What, no satellite defense system? No anti-aircraft weapons concealed on roof-tops? Was no one watching Mars, looking for launches or approaching craft?

How did the humans build a ground force and attack ships they believed would be sufficient to take back the planet? Fifty years is just two generations and we know that even suviving on Mars is an epic challenge, let alone breeding up a million or so soldiers. And don't even get me started on the problems of Mars' lower gravity and what that would do to second-generation humans born there.

Why did the humans attack with force? Wouldn't it make more sense, as it would in the first place, over that fifty years to find a way to shut down the synths another way? Were there no secret human bases on Earth? It seems fairly easy to get back and land without being spotted.

When the synths escape on a subway train, why is it covered in graffiti? What, in the 50 years since the war, when the synths rebuilt the city, did they not bother to clean/repaint the train, or are there juvenilee delinquent synth graffiti artists?

Sigh.

As is so often the case when a movie has such gaping plot holes, it's not so much the holes themselves that annoys, as it is that they could so easily have been avoided with just a single night in a bar with a bottle or two. Why not have the synths wipe out most of humanity with a biological attack that only 2% survive? Ding! Huge population numbers, worldwide coordination and sympathiser problems solved! Why not make it 200 years or a 1000 since the war? Ding! Problem of building a human invasion force solved! Why not have the colony on Mars apparently dead and abandoned (humans have secretly moved to another base)? Ding! Problem of not watching the skies and preparing solved! OK, these solutions are not perfect, but they came after 2 minutes thought with a cup of tea.

There are good things about this movie - the preparation for the reveal of the twist is cleverly done. Peter's nightmares are at the same time vague enough and similar enough to be memories of the first war with the humans, and the scenes where he attempts to use his "prophecies" to guide their escape are nicely handled. The actual reveal is a total surprise - I didn't see it coming at all - and I like to think I'm pretty good at spotting these things (I did guess the aliens were humans pretty early on - I guess that should have been a clue). All the "problems" I had with the first hour make sense after the reveal, and there was clearly a lot of thought put into the scenes, acting and direction for that to work. The SFX are mostly very good (although the final sequence of a bridge being destroyed looks pretty amateur by 2018 standards). But man, those plot holes...

It's not just the plot holes that are bad either. Long before the hour mark the constant whining, screaming and sobbing from the two girls had made me want to stick pencils in my ears. There's a ton of cliches - the convenient "I know tunnels", the young child that goes back for their doll, the everyday guy protagonist who turns out to be a former fighter, the lot. Plus, of course, the ending painfully telegraphs an upcoming Netflix series.

If you leave your brain at the door, this is easily a 4* movie, but the plot holes just keep hammering away. Perhaps if the writers had brought their brains into the room, especially after binge-watching the excellent Humans, it could even have been 5 stars.