It's not 'After Earth', the mega large box
office disappointment from M. Night Shamylan and Will Smith,
it's 'AE: Apocalypse Earth', the Asylums mockbusting response
to that film. Now I know The Asylum isn't in possession
of a crystal ball or anything so they don't what's going to be
successful and what's going to flop, but they might want to
start mockbusting films that are successful in their natural
state. 'American Battleship', 'Atlantic Rim', 'Hansel
and Gretel', 'Jack the Giant Slayer', this movie… were all box
office disappointments. But if they had mockbusted 'Iron
Man' or 'World War Z' or 'The Heat'… which shouldn't have been
too difficult… or even made a sequel to their fast and furious
mockbuster, '200 MPH'… this time calling it, I don't know,
'300 MPH'… it just seems like a better move to me.
Regardless of all of that, we have 'Apocalypse Earth' to deal
with on this day featuring people walking in the woods.
A lot.
Sometime in the near future aliens will attack our
planet. Even though it does look like one lousy alien
ship to me, but nonetheless it's doing much damage. All
looks lost for the human race but there are a number of earth
ships on a mission to find a new world to populate in hopes
that the human condition can carry on.
We don't know how long our ship inhabitants were in cryo, but
they crash land on this one particular planet. The folks
that managed to survive that crash found themselves being
quickly attacked by an odd combination of blue humanoids and
funny looking things in a state of Predator Phase. No
worries though because hardcore armed forces soldier Lt.
Frank Baum (Adrian Paul) has regained consciousness and he's
busting caps.
First order of business is to organize the
surviving humans and figure out where they are and what the
hell is going on. Where they are is a mystery as this
planet is covered in greenery and has rings around it and
stuff, but it is also completely inhabitable. Second
order of business is to find a ship and maybe make it back to
Earth, since this planet is so damn hostile. This will
be made easier since we have hotshot pilot Capt. Sam Crow
(Richard Greico) who has also regained consciousness and he
can fly anything. Anything. We must also
mention that TIM (Gray Hawks) is along for the ride, the
Data-esque Android who is really handy to have around in a
pinch.
But for now, survival is the order of the day. This is
made a little easier by the crazy hot camouflaged alien Lea
(Bali Rodriguez) who speaks a language that wavers between
alien broken English and Harvard professor perfect English,
but because she looks so fetching in her camouflaged bikini,
we'll let that slide. The problem, as it were, is
that those Predator Phase aliens are really bad news and are
hunting our surviving humans, who are dropping off one by
one. Is this going to stop Lt. Baum and Lea the alien
girl from making a love connection? No it is not.
Love just won't wait my friends.
But the situation is a dire one. Blue aliens on one
side, invisible aliens on the other, giant grasshoppers to the
left, flying ships on top, hungry lizards to the left… with
the goal being to make it back to Earth. Which has been
Apocalypsed. Or not…
It's like this… I enjoyed Thunder Levin's 'AE: Apocalypse
Earth' but then I watch an inordinate amount of these types of
movies, know what I'm saying? My tolerance level is
pretty high for this sort of thing. So if your baseline
for what you would find acceptable in a science fiction movie
is something along the lines of 'Prometheus', then there is
little chance that you will find anything of any value in this
'Apocalypse Earth'. The acting in inconsistent, veterans
Adrian Paul and Richard Greico, along with Gray Hawkes as the
android showing up the majority of their co-stars. Did
we buy Bali Rodriguez as a tough alien woman, raised in wild,
living off the land, conditioned for survival? Nope, she
was clearly a supermodel in green body makeup. The
special effects are suspect, the pace erratic and often too
slow since we do have to spend a lot of time watching our
characters walk in the woods, and the outcome of all of this
is fairly obvious, though I did like the delivery of this
obvious outcome.
So why was I entertained by 'AE: Apocalypse Earth'?
Despite its oppressive shortcomings, the good in the movie
outweighed the bad, at least from my perspective. Adrian
Paul could've chosen to sleepwalk through this movie, but he
gave it his all, perhaps buoyed by the fact that his character
got to grope and gawk at Bali Rodriguez for the majority of
the movie. I don't know. While the pacing was
erratic, most of the time Levin did try to err on the side of
action as these walks in the woods were at least purposeful
and usually led to some kind of suspect special effects
sequence or shootout. Except maybe when the cast joined
in and sang 'It's Long way to Tipperary'. Don't know
what that was about, other than that song is probably out of
the public domain and free to use. And as I mentioned
before I thought the resolution, or at least the execution of
this resolution, was pretty cool.
True enough, our baseline for these things are low, but it
slides. So where we were disappointed with the afore
mentioned 'Prometheus', we weren't disappointed with 'AE:
Apocalypse Earth'. Different expectations from a 150
million dollar movie as opposed to a 150 dollar movie.
