j* Movie Reviews 2019

Project Ithaca (2019)

Do you know what's not a good idea, to make a movie that is 90% composed of single character close up shots.

This has an interesting premise, sort of. What I mean is the trailer looked pretty good. An alien force is abducting people and getting inside their minds. So far so good. What results is a bit like an alien-bio version of The Matrix complete with oracle/alien overseer.

And that could still be good. But most of the movie is the six or so main characters who are stuck to the walls of this sort of fleshy, creepy biologically-alien type craft - think any number of entombed alive alien tropes. They're presumably in a semi-circular arrangement as they often talk to each other. But they're all filmed individually, as if they never managed to get the whole cast together on the same day. There are one or two shots of a couple of them together in this flesh set. But mostly it is the most explicit example of "talking heads" I have ever seen.

Very rarely we see the alien craft flying through space, and when you do the CGI is really good. Sometimes there are flashbacks to the past/s and sometimes there are kind of alternate imaginings, or mentally safe spaces. These bits too are not that bad.

But at the end of the day there was a lot of close up talking and not much here to make a visual film. I'm not even exactly sure how it ended, to be honest.

J* gives it 2 stars.