Light

The scattered survivors of an interstellar transport ship, that crash-landed on an inhospitable planet where it’s perpetually night, must work together if they want to escape the creatures lurking in the shadows.

This movie starts out with multiple escape pods all plummeting down to the surface of a planet that is shrouded in a constant and near total darkness. That’s the entire basis of this film. The survivors of the crash are all lost in the planet’s threatening darkness, and they spend the film first trying to find each other, and then trying to find a way off-planet. I understand that everything being shrouded in darkness is a part of the story, but—due to the film’s extremely low budget, and probably the general quality of the crew as well—everything is lit in a really shitty subpar way, and that means that it’s too dark to see anything. Add on top of that shit that this is a 90 minute creature feature where the creature doesn’t even show up for real until an hour and twenty-three minutes in, and you’ve got yourself a dull, overly long, and frustrating watch.

I really hate to ding super low budget films like this for (presumably) doing the best they possibly can with their clearly very limited resources, but this movie was interminable, and just straight-up bad.

Despite clearly having been filmed in one of the filmmaker’s basement, or maybe their garage, or perhaps in an empty bedroom—which is why everything is so dark, it’s a failed attempt to hide this fact—there’s no sense of geography, or distance, or anything. It’s like being on an old haunted house ride, but the lights are up enough that you can see you’re only slowly going back and forth across the same room.

Plus, we mostly spend time with the film’s two main characters, two women who don’t look all that different to begin with. But in the film, the characters are mostly wearing space suits, so most of the time, all you see is their faces, which are lit by a pale light under their helmet’s faceplate, which is often fogged from condensation, so it’s often unclear who is even speaking. It’s especially difficult when they’re both panicking and trying to communicate over the radio, all while stumbling around in the vague dark, in the same outfits, going “Shit! Shit! Can you hear me? Shit!” over and over, all while their equipment is beeping incessantly. Why don’t they just turn on more lights, you ask? Because the monsters are… wait for it… attracted to light.

Like I said, it’s a frustrating viewing experience.

On top of that, also because of the darkness, Light into maybe one of the most visually uninteresting film I’ve ever seen. If you’re gonna do shit like this, like hide the fact that you’re filming your movie in the rented ballroom of your local Holiday Inn by turning off all the lights, then you better have an interesting story, one that features interesting characters, who are being played by some very talented and charismatic actors. Or at least a good monster.

Light does not have any of this.

Plus, this is a minor annoyance, but still… they very obviously used the motion tracker from the movie Aliens, both the sound and the appearance. It’s one thing to have a production budget of maybe $15, maybe $17.50, I understand that, but it’s another thing altogether to be so creatively bankrupt that you think you can just yoink an iconic sci-fi prop.

I will say that I liked it when the characters figured out that all the piles of muddy rock they‘ve been walking amongst are actually huge piles of shit, that was a great reveal. But then the characters spend the next ten minutes or so digging diamonds out of the shit piles over and over. And eventually, they find human bones. This is how this terrible film ruins their one good moment, first by dragging it out, and then by restating the threat with the bones, because the simple fact that they were huge piles of shit just wasn’t enough of a warning on its own, I guess.

Frustrating, dull, and somehow stretching 90-some minutes into an eternity, this is a film that is best ignored forever and forgotten.

Hard pass.