REVIEW: AMERICA’S ALIEN INVASION – THE LOST UFO ENCOUNTERS / CERT: U / DIRECTOR: J. MICHAEL LONG / STARRING: STAN GORDON, DAVID TWITCHWELL, WILLIAM KONKOLESKY / RELEASE DATE: VOD OUT NOW
We love a good conspiracy theory at STARBURST, and this documentary claims that the White House was actually privy to a UFO invasion in both 1952 and 1963, deciding to keep schtum about the whole thing. A government? Covering things up? Surely not.
Now if you have any fleeting interest in the whole UFO thing, chances are you’ve heard all of what’s on show in America’s Alien Invasion before. The features looks at ‘incidents’ as far back as the days of World War II and even talks about how the alien influence can be seen in pyramids and temples dotted around the globe, not to mention cave paintings from the days when dinobot dinosaurs roamed the earth. We even get input from the Vatican on the matter. Yes, the organisation that struggles so much to believe in the likes of gay marriage actually has some quarters that believe that little green men have visited our humble planet. Similarly, we also get the outlook of demonologists on the UFO phenomenon.
America’s Alien Invasion ticks all of the usual boxes for such a feature, including the always-fun topics of abductions, probes and experiments, and then there’s the ever-familiar bug-eyed alien images that have become as synonymous with the field as Elliott has with E.T. Whilst throwing up the same old propaganda, the documentary also urges you, the faithful viewer, to believe and calls for public outcry to take hold and demand answers from the government. One big question is why doesn’t the media beat to the same drum and demand answers? Well, of course, America’s Alien Invasion claims that the media is instructed not to report on any UFO shenanigans. Then there’s the angle that, due to not having access to substantial proof, media outlets risk their reputation if they run such stories as ‘aliens took my dog for intergalactic intrusive exploration’.
The formula of America’s Alien Invasion is a tad overplayed by this point, with it feeling like a repetitive look at worn-out theories and speculative mud-slinging. Just because the feature has an Inception-lite score thrown in over the usual ‘the truth is out there’ material doesn’t make it any fresher or relevant. A brisk running time of 60 minutes makes the film not totally unpalatable, but the subject matter still can’t help but feel stale. At this stage in the game, and with a major lack of any modern developments in terms of proof, surely even Fox Mulder has lost interest in whether the truth really is out there.
A decent enough documentary for those new to the topic, but America’s Alien Invasion doesn’t raise any new issues or bring anything revolutionary to the table, making it nothing more than casual interest fodder at best.
Extras: Trailers
