And The Asylum keeps on going… This was titled Age of Tomorrow in America, and whilst that title sounds familiar to another alien invasion movie, this doesn’t even pale in comparison. What we have here are two separate stories happening at the same time as this alien invasion until they sort of converge at the end. This may sound cool, but it gets tiring really fast. In fact, it only further cements the fact that The Asylum movies are as boring as hell, badly made, and in this case, squanders real talent on screen.
Granted, Kelly Hu still looks great and brings charming command and gusto to her role, but this completely wastes her talents which were made to much better use in X-Men 2, The Scorpion King, TV’s Arrow and so on. The same can also be said of Robert Piccardo, who too tries his best and is the most involved actor in the cast, yet this is another case where Piccardo’s material is beneath him. The locations are pretty imaginative and quite pretty to look at, and the spacesuits, especially when compared to the rest of the film’s production values (which are very few indeed), look decent enough. But that said, however, the movie is incredibly cheap in almost every aspect. The driving sequences are atrociously handled, looking as though they were edited in a very haphazard and lifeless way.
In fact, the editing itself looks like it was done with a cheese grater, and the special effects are incredibly ropey in execution; okay one second, poorly rendered the next. The aliens themselves are so unconvincing in their realisation it makes even the ropiest of Doctor Who monsters more terrifying and menacing in comparison. The soundtrack is abominable, but even so, you wouldn’t be able to hear through the loud noises and shouting going on, apart from the quieter moments when it really becomes incredibly distracting. The plot (well, if you can call it one) makes absolutely no sense whatsoever with the Basil-exposition scenes becoming more like padding, feeling very ham-fisted and becoming highly suspect as it’s highly plausible that the writers themselves would’ve had no clue what they were talking about or how to deliver it. Any moments that are meant to be snappy are anything but, and the emotionally impactful scenes end up being just emotionally bereft.
The story is a disaster in itself, and despite the film going on for near an hour and a half, it feels much longer than that. There was zero tension or fun throughout, none of the subplots are interesting with the typical “father trying to find his daughter” storyline being painfully slow, plus it ends on a very anti-climatic note. The film’s pacing is erratic, the action is lifeless and looks under-rehearsed, and the direction is flat, showing little finesse or technical prowess. The characters themselves are generically cardboard cut-out stereotypes and the fact that they are so badly drawn-out and developed, with maybe the exception of both Hu and Picardo, the acting was terrible with most of them looking lost, some bored out of their brains, and a handful looking as though they were trying to remember what their lines were.
Overall, for The Asylum, Alien Extinction (or Age of Tomorrow) could’ve been much worse and it was laughably bad, admittedly, but it’s still poorly executed and incredibly tiresome, which just goes to show that it’s time for The Asylum to stop making these types of movies and squandering the talent involved (in this case both Hu and Picardo).
ALIEN EXTINCTION / CERT: TBC / DIRECTOR: JAMES KONDELIK / SCREENPLAY: JACOB COONEY, BILL HANSTOCK / STARRING: KELLY HU, ROBERT PICCARDO, ANTHONY MARKS, LANE TOWNSEND / RELEASE DATE: TBC
