Main cast: Adrian Paul (General Dane), Reiley McClendon (Ryan Andros), Rick Ravanello (Spears), Douglas Tait (The Heavy), Joe Reegan (Alex Omohundro), Nic Rasenti (Harty), Matthew Holmes (North), Sven Ruygrok (Frankie Forello), Brandon Auret (Savino), and Scott E Miller (John Wilks)
Director: Jabbar Raisani
Director and screenwriter Jabbar Raisani probably wants to make some kind of statement with Alien Outpost. It’s a sci-fi military flick patterned after a reality TV show, and, deliberately, it tries to parallel the current the situation happening in the Middle-East.
Set in 2023, Earth is still recovering from an alien invasion that ended about ten years ago. Humanity banded together to drive the aliens out, but some remnants of the alien forces, called the Heavies, still remain. This movie revolves around a bunch of new soldiers and two camera crew sent to Outpost 37, somewhere in the Middle-East. Fighting is the fiercest here, or so it is said, as for the most part, the soldiers in this movie seem to have a lot of time to do mundane things like cussing and engaging in competitions of machismo with one another. Predictably enough, there will be a grand rescue, a horrifying discovery, and many, many stereotypes.
I suppose budgetary limitations make the annoying reality TV show gimmick a more favorable option, as it is probably cheaper to film things this way. But the end result is a very mundane and cheap “shot in a single week” feel to everything. Worse, the characters are all flat and uninteresting stereotypes; if you have seen one military movie, you can recognize the archetypes and tropes here. The pacing is shot – shot with sedatives, that is, and it is way too easy to fall asleep halfway into the movie. I can vouch for the last part – best sleep I’ve had in a while. Worse, the grand twist can be seen coming from a mile away, so forcing oneself to stay awake to the end won’t earn one a good payoff in the end.
And, sadly, there aren’t any eye candy (some guys go shirtless, but they are the definition of the phrase “butterface”), comedy, gratuitous nudity, or even halfway decent violence to make this movie memorable even a little. It’s just a boring cheap-looking movie that takes itself way too seriously. Don’t get stranded in Alien Outpost – there is something else better, surely, on another channel.
