"We have no skills" says one protagonist to the other about midway through this film. And that about gets to the heart of what the film conveys - that today's young adults are barely adults. They have no sense of permanence in the society they occupy, instead being carried along on a wave of Internet chatter and trendy group-think. At another point in the film, the heroine compares her life at age 2_ to her mother's: she had a job, she was married, she had children. The reality that hits her as any sense of career building she might have had is unceremoniously swept away, along with the vestiges of who passed for a pretty shabby ego propped up Internet lists. And in that we have the thematic parallel to the invasion of Earth that unfolds as the plot catalyst -- it is not the center of the plot, but a mere plot device to illustrate how crummy it is to be coming-of-late-age (if ever) in the 21st century. What makes the film genius is the portrayal of the main characters as perfectly reasonable, likable, and competent individuals who are complete victims of not just the titular circumstance, but the greater circumstance of not really having a role of even moderate importance in the pre-invasion world.
The storytelling is also better than decent, and certainly better than what you will find in nearly any of the garbage passing for film today garnering media attention. There are unforeseeable twists, tension, a novel framework of alien life / occupation that I would describe as Attack the Block meets Killer Clowns from Mars. The only dissatisfying aspect is that the story does such a decent job of slowly building it's invasion scenario one grain of sand at a time, that I really really wanted to see at least the outline of the finished sand castle. Instead, the film ends by following one more grain of sand on it's journey without providing any answers; the result is a feeling that the stakes didn't really matter at all.
My personal assessment is that the ending suffered the effects of the very disease it was poking fun of -- the inability of modern writers to pick one ending over another for fear of being criticized. So just pick an "open" ending and claim that critics are being small minded. Well, I like a story with an ending. I did not care for this ending, as it was merely an ending of the "escape" plot on Earth, but does nothing to address the goings on that are the real story - the arc of the main characters. Have they changed? Sure. Has their relationship to their environment changed? Yes. But we don't get to see how it's changed, only that it's changed.
The storytelling is also better than decent, and certainly better than what you will find in nearly any of the garbage passing for film today garnering media attention. There are unforeseeable twists, tension, a novel framework of alien life / occupation that I would describe as Attack the Block meets Killer Clowns from Mars. The only dissatisfying aspect is that the story does such a decent job of slowly building it's invasion scenario one grain of sand at a time, that I really really wanted to see at least the outline of the finished sand castle. Instead, the film ends by following one more grain of sand on it's journey without providing any answers; the result is a feeling that the stakes didn't really matter at all.
My personal assessment is that the ending suffered the effects of the very disease it was poking fun of -- the inability of modern writers to pick one ending over another for fear of being criticized. So just pick an "open" ending and claim that critics are being small minded. Well, I like a story with an ending. I did not care for this ending, as it was merely an ending of the "escape" plot on Earth, but does nothing to address the goings on that are the real story - the arc of the main characters. Have they changed? Sure. Has their relationship to their environment changed? Yes. But we don't get to see how it's changed, only that it's changed.
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