Our Paul Gratton takes a look at The Outer Threat, now in limited release in Canada!
About: After making a groundbreaking extraterrestrial discovery, astrophysicists Daniel and Michelle are forced to flee from home with their family — pursued through the countryside by a relentless and anonymous assailant. As their flight unfolds, the line between cosmic revelation and human paranoia blurs, leading to a tense and emotional confrontation that challenges the boundaries of understanding, science, and survival.
Reaction: If you are gonna take on something like Stephen Spielberg’s Disclosure Day, you better have the budget to do it properly. This is another example of a Canadian film whose obvious resources fall beneath what the marketplace expects from the genre. An astrologer who has been gazing at the heavens for many years through a rusty old telescope somewhere in the North comes across some artifacts that convince him of intelligent life in space. He finally convinces his mostly estranged partner to confirm his findings as he believes an invasion of aliens is imminent. There are a few good ideas imbedded in the screenplay, and the filmmaker does what he can with limited resources (there is a nod to the chase scene in North by Northwest using drones that is particularly effective) but the rusty old telescope and the lack of high tech scientific equipment on display unfortunately relegate this late arrival to the alien invasion genre to the B-movie direct-to-Amazon heap for die-hard sci-fi freaks only.
Rating: 4 out of 10
