![]() And seldom does the film, save for a big and middlingly executed twist at the end, stray from the formula that governs much sci-fi genre fare. Vague social commentary – “A machine took my job!” reads a protest sign – is sprinkled throughout. A child’s teddy bear functions a bit like Chekhov’s gun. Peter, who works late and is resented by Alice, has nightmares that seem to augur some kind of looming apocalypse. Unfortunately, though, the plot hits a series of easily foreseeable beats. Both work in artificial intelligence, which makes them perfect foils for the impending alien coup. ![]() The two play Peter and Alice, who have two young daughters and are struggling to find a work-life balance. That’s no fault of the actors, specifically leads Michael Peña and Lizzy Caplan, who are formidable despite a surprisingly dull script co-written by Eric Heisserer (improbably, the same man who wrote Arrival, one of the best science fiction films in recent memory). But it is likely to live on as lite fare rather than the blockbuster it was clearly engineered to be. Much of the film suggests it is meant for the cinema, and it was: the Clover-resemblant alien interlopers the dystopian and somewhat brutalist production design a predictable surplus of pyrotechnics. An adequately thrilling tale of an alien invasion, it was originally slated for a January release with Universal but was nixed by the studio earlier this year, at which point Netflix, as it did with thrice-delayed The Cloverfield Paradox, scooped it up. A similar plight afflicts the streamer’s latest sci-fi release, Extinction, directed by Australian filmmaker Ben Young.
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