Another awesome trailer – Another lackluster alien film.

Okay, perhaps my one liner sells Extraterrestrial a bit short. It’s not without its shining moments. It just seems like for every good thing it had going for itself – there were two bad things working against it. It opens strong enough. A young lady running for help before she is taken by what we assume are visitors. Then we jump into a follow up scene where almost all color is drained from the picture incept for a subtle blue tint. This was somewhat jarring since the opening seemed so well put together and balanced. After the follow up scene we regain a full color palette and it looks like we are watching a quality film once more.

Now comes the time where we meet our main characters. Front and center is a loving young couple that is headed to a cabin in the woods to take some real-estate shots. Joining them are 3 completely useless friends. Sometimes it seems as if the only purpose they serve is to lob in some truly awful dialogue to fill some time. Apart from being generally unlikable, the acting isn’t particularly strong with any of them. That doesn’t stop with our secondary characters – poor performances trickle alllllll the way down the cast here. Perhaps thats not fair. At times I felt they were capable – they simply had very little to work with in terms of dialogue. It’s also worth mentioning that the effects are mostly bad. Every now and then there would be a nice touch, but then we just get flooded with faux lens flare and animated flames the rest of the time.

The story tends to take a “something new, something old, and something borrowed” approach. For a flick about aliens – Extraterrestrial seems to follow the slasher formula fairly well. Needless to say, thats rather uncommon and was a fresh spin on things for a while. The problem is things drag in the middle a bit much to keep the viewer engaged. I found myself checking my phone from time to time, and thats never a good thing with me. The runtime is just over an hour and forty minutes. I feel like we could have cut 15 minutes out and I would have enjoyed the ride a bit more.

The truly saddening news for me is that this film goes where I have wished EVERY abduction film would go. The problem is, they don’t do anything when they get there. In fact – it’s a sort of sprint to the finish line and then the credits roll.