#45 - Interstellar Wars

You ever heard of the UK based Brightspark Productions? If you haven’t, I don’t blame you, they’re responsible for such scummy sh*t as Braver and Tangled Up, old animations repackaged as Disney movie rip-offs. See the I Hate Everything review for more info on that

So what happens when they actually try original content? You get Interstellar Wars.

This one’s gonna be a tough one folks, let’s dig in.

Ah, Mc’Choen Movies, the movie ripoff factory (that isn't Asylum). You know the other title for this movie is Independence Wars: Insurgence. Gee, I wonder what it’s trying to rip-off, I mean it’s so subtle

Yeah, that

About 10 seconds into the movie, the volume remembers it’s a thing. But we truly open in space, or at least whatever stock footage they could get that day. A crappy looking portal appears in space and an inception noise occurs as a single ship comes through. Yup, in a movie called Interstellar Wars, there is one alien ship and one planet. That’s not Interstellar Wars, that’s just making up a cool sounding title with a fabricated poster, and maybe hiding what it’s trying to rip off, albeit badly, as we’ll see.

Also, the spaceship looks sh*t, it looks okay in space because the darkness hides how bad it looks but we’ll see it in daylight in a minute and oh boy, no expense spent.

The writer of this, Robert Ryan, has no other production credits on IMDb, I wonder why… So Earth, stock photo of a satellite that’s supposedly a research facility but inside looks like the set off a kids school play and two monitors are having sex. Classy. I already hate this movie. The male one puts his shirt back on but naturally the woman doesn’t so we can see her boobs for that bit longer. They get a signal alert and find out some things about it, nor sure what those things are but the music is telling me it’s serious so I’ll go with that.

They report their findings to some guy in bed, Kraymer apparently. Isn’t there someone on duty you could contact? So, he taps his phone and hears something. The ship approaches earth and the music tells us it’s serious. After a stock photo of the desert we see 4 kids? Clearly not looking at the view. There are 2 couples and 3 women and in comes a creep, asking for water, he’s a creep. He leaves after contributing nothing. You want to know these characters’ names, I sure do. The creep returns, shouting look and just as he does they notice the spaceship overhead.

“Could be one of ours”

The creep is attacked by the alien red pulse of doom and the ship just leaves, towards LA. OK, so there are no aliens in this movie. The aliens turn humans into zombies because reasons. The man knocks him out. And they run.

Time for News Alert News to serve exposition through a guy who clearly doesn’t give a sh*t. Apparently, they have an award-winning team on channel 6, yeah, nothing about this movie is winning awards, believe me. Stacey Stoffer is our on-scene reporter, reporting from no-where near the desert and near a road. That ended without any point.

“This is not some big budget Hollywood production”

Jeez, the jokes just write themselves, don’t they? And you’re referencing War of the Worlds which first and foremost is a book, then it’s 2 mediocre movies, one of which I’ve reviewed. Cut to a tent in the middle of no-where, where the military apparently operate now. And we get another problem with the movie, 5 seconds after the last one. Yeah, the audio is atrocious, particularly in the SAGC scenes, the microphone feedback hurts my ears. I’ve sat through a lot of low budget cr*p, this is the first where the audio is this bad.

They ask for former General Spears who may have some answers regarding the aliens for some reason. Meanwhile the heterosexual couple are driving home in their convertible mini, the girl can’t use her phone because the aliens are blocking the signal or something. So, far as I can tell, the aliens plan to turn a select number of random people into zombies, whilst cutting communications and then… Yeah, I don’t think the writers thought that far ahead either. They might try the landline when they get home because the aliens can’t block it.

So, Kraymer gets the intel from the two slowest officers I’ve ever heard about the zombie issue. Meanwhile the homosexual couple are heading to a shack to keep out the city, where it’ll likely be chaos. We find out the heterosexual couple are named Kyle and Kelly in this scene. We are 18 minutes into the film, apparently, this homosexual couple is controversial with Kraymer, who is the father of one of them.

One inception noise later we cut to Kelly’s house, and the acoustics are cr*p here too. Kelly phones her father whilst Kyle, being a soldier is heading out to fight. This guy is no Will Smith, Kraymer is ready to bring a car to bring her in and she continues asking stupid questions, moving on. And we find out the now the other girls are Sara and Roxy. Progress, we know the names of most of the main characters, now if something could actually happen, that’d be grand.

An idiot is being attacked by one of the zombies, Kyle shoots her and gives him a gun for some reason. He uses the gun to snatch his ride, it’s an embarrassing little car anyway, unfortunately Kyle tries to show off his badass credentials, also the girl survived a bullet in the head and kills him off. Kyle drives away, unfortunately still in the stupid car.

God, they have the awful unnecessary car brake effects. Sara and Roxy pull up at presumably the house of Roxy’s mother, she’s the worst actor in the film, and that’s saying something since I’ve yet to see a good performance. Time for another edition of News Alert News, apparently, the President is going to be speaking in all of just over of 5 and a half hours about combating the threat. Good to see things are moving at their usual pace in the American government.

Apparently the anchor has just been informed there’s a spaceship right above Stacey Stoffer. She speaks to one of those nut-jobs who thinks she’s been abducted by aliens. You were likely on drugs, sweetheart. The ship approaches and flashes it’s red pulse of doom, the camera feed is briefly cut for some reason. The nut-job kills Stacey as she’s been zombified.

The worst actor in the move insists they take their disabled neighbour, so we have more cannon fodder. Meanwhile a drone that looks like utter utter sh*t takes off, it’s a drone dispatched by the Whitehouse without consulting the military. It seems Donald Trump is absolutely in charge here.

General Spears arrives, having caught up with the situation by watching News Alert News. Yeah… of course. He says he has a secret to share with them. The aliens have been watching them since Hiroshima, and apparently Roswell was a UFO *sigh*, they kept it out of the public eye for fear of causing mass panic, a special task-force was created and you’ve stopped caring at this point, haven’t you? There’s some gravitational anomaly on the dark side of the moon where the ship opened its wormhole.

One thing to note about General Spears, he’s an alcoholic and has a drinking flask. Believe me, if I was in… this… I would be drinking too. They got funding for the exploration of this from the moon-landing project, the race with the Russians. This is conspiracy theory level bullsh*t. They get feed from the drone analysing the alien spacecraft. General Spears immediately says a direct hit with a missile would scratch it. Unfortunately, the ship sends out its own sh*ty looking drones to shoot it out of the sky.

A random woman enters the facility and says the ship is infecting people with a nano-bot virus. Rather forgetting what a virus is. The nanobots transmit through blood contact because of course they do. This is what they call a brilliant military strategy. Batman, what do you think?

This is a painfully slow procedure with 100 different ways of going wrong. There are other attack methods that have been much more effective. How about the Skrull method of infiltrating society using shape-shifting and replacing key individuals, or maybe the Reach method of attempting peaceful relations whilst poisoning the food supplies to make the population more docile. Or just the plain old surprise attack blow up everything in sight method. Of course, the real reason we’re seeing this dumb as hell strategy is because they don’t have the budget for any of that, I say to that, if you don’t have the budget for that, why are you even trying. Independence Day Resurgence wasn’t even a popular movie, it came out too late and people were already sick of disaster movies. 

Apparently the first waves of the virus were given to abductees, and the pulsing light of doom just activates them, this is getting even dumber. So Roxy goes to get her disabled neighbour, she finds a gun conveniently laid out for her and you can guess where this is going. Yup, he has the virus, she shoots him but as we found out earlier, that doesn’t make much of a difference. Apparently, the signal block serves a secondary purpose, to activate those who don’t get touched by the ship. Good job everyone in the world owns a mobile phone then.

So Kyle finds the air base and finds out from his incredibly sleezy totally gonna die friend that they’ve been ordered to conduct a full on strike on the spaceship.

So Roxy, Sarah and Roxy’s mother head out, death of the neighbour glanced over. So turns out the President is not Donald Trump, she’s a woman. She tries to reassure the public but it’s about as empty as words from any other politician. They have all of 12 hours before too many people are infected for the spread to be reversible, which would make sense if this were an airborne virus, but since it’s transmitted through biting essentially, why is any number important?

Fortunately, they have a plan, they need to broadcast a signal to every phone in the world counter to the frequencies used by the aliens, effectively blocking it. Meanwhile Roxy runs someone over, they go to check it because Roxy’s mother’s an idiot and Roxy’s mother is bitten and killed. This upsets Roxy to the point where she becomes a baby.

Meanwhile 5 ships move in to attack the spaceship, that’s it we’re moving onto the next scene. Meanwhile the Roxy and Sara stop because they’re out of Gas. You’re in a Toyota Prius, you might have some electricity you can use, you know! Kelly arrives at the military base, immediately allowed access to the top-secret parts. Kelly wants to get in touch with the air base to talk to Kyle, but finds out he’s already in the air, fortunately they can patch people through to the craft’s coms.  She says… exactly the things she said when he left so this is pointless.

The alien’s defence drones move into position, not entirely sure if a mission even dented it. Sara collapses and I think I can guess where this is going. Unfortunately, we’re her to get an anti-war PSA and this is the reason this gets a full review. I don’t care if your acting is below average and your effects are sh*t, I expect this stuff in low budget but when you have a sh*t story and get preachy! That is disgusting! They even suggest the aliens are being merciful. F*ck you, f*ck you, f*ck you, f*ck you, f*ck you! If the aliens are trying to be merciful, why are they attacking with a 50-year long plan involving viruses?

They have the satellite prepared but the code isn’t ready, it’s up to the fighters to buy more time. They score a second direct hit but since we see no debris, I can’t tell whether the missile has any impact. Sara and Roxy arrive at a shack and predictably, we find out that Sara was also bitten. A man with a gun comes in an effort to pad the movie out. Just 20 minutes left.

He finds out Sara has the virus and is a bit crazy. The destroy a third drone but there appear to be even more of them now. The crazy guy prepares to kill her and Roxy fights back, knocking him out. They have the signal prepared as Sara and Roxy head to a military base for help. You are taking someone who’s potentially infected into a room full of high government officials, good plan.

The tech person who I haven’t named until now has spotted a potential flaw in their counter-signal that could instead increase it. The ship launches its second wave, and there quite a few more than last time. One of the ships is shot down. Sara is brought into the command centre and with the urgency now close to home, they cancel out further tests and transmit the counter-signal. It works and Sara’s nanobots are deactivated, saving her life. So guess that flaw was also something to pad the movie out. Oh and the homophobia subplot just got resolved rather instantaneously and pointlessly.

With that bullsh*t done, it’s time for the final ships to make their attack, 2 more ships are destroyed. The creepy guy fires a missile, which does nothing but the ship retreats anyway this alien race is really a bunch of cowards. Kyle flies after it, trying to get another missile locked on, which hits and it still does nothing, but Kyle flew past his maximum altitude and begins hurtling out of control, despite every fathom of common sense telling him to eject he somehow regains control of the aircraft. Idiot.

The alien ship leaves but the general considers that there may be sequels to cash out of this sh*t and you know what, I stopped caring at this point.

So that was Interstellar Wars and what a heap of sh*t

It’s badly acted, badly edited, particularly with the audio. The visual effects are below par and the physical sets look awful. The story is slowly paced and makes no sense under any form of analysis and has the gall to be pretentious as well.

Until this point, 2035: Forbidden Dimensions was objectively the worst movie I’ve ever seen, it’s just been beaten by this movie, which whilst easier to follow, is worse in just about every other aspect

THIS MOVIE GIVES ME RAGE ISSUES

Rating 1135%