I say 'inexplicably' because at first this seems like it should be a difficult thing to screw up. The trailer hints at an expansive world and high stakes. But maybe it's easy to explain why this is so forgettable: it's mostly an unsatisfying pastiche of clichés that don't really ever cohere into something interesting.
It starts off promising enough. The initial scenes set the stage for a peaceful, almost idyllic setting which is interrupted by the arrival of a malevolent force. The introduction of the adversaries is at first portrayed with tension, but this quickly dissolves into just a bunch of cartoonish bad guys. What follows is an awkward hour and a half long team-building exercise followed by what feels like a climax that would feel rushed if we didn't just kind of want it to be over anyway. None of the characters we recruit along the way are given any dimension, we don't really care about any of them, and they don't spend enough time together to form any chemistry with one another.
The writing here is just not very good. It's often hard to tell if the actors are really just not into it or if their lines and parts are just so bizarrely uninspired that they have nothing to work with. This is set up like Magnificent Seven in space, but statistically at least one of these characters should *accidentally* be compelling, but they're all really dull. So many things are hinted at and then never qualified or brought up again. In a film like this, at the very least the villain is usually memorable, and Ed Skrein is usually pretty good in those roles, but here even that is paper thin. This is one of those films where things just sort of happen and there doesn't seem to be a lot that connects one scene to another.
Of course this is a part one, and maybe part two will somehow develop the innumerable loose threads here. Maybe we'll actually see some chemistry build between the characters and begin to care about this struggle. But I kind of doubt it. There were just too many consistently missed opportunities here and indications that the writers have no understanding of how to build a story of this magnitude.
It starts off promising enough. The initial scenes set the stage for a peaceful, almost idyllic setting which is interrupted by the arrival of a malevolent force. The introduction of the adversaries is at first portrayed with tension, but this quickly dissolves into just a bunch of cartoonish bad guys. What follows is an awkward hour and a half long team-building exercise followed by what feels like a climax that would feel rushed if we didn't just kind of want it to be over anyway. None of the characters we recruit along the way are given any dimension, we don't really care about any of them, and they don't spend enough time together to form any chemistry with one another.
The writing here is just not very good. It's often hard to tell if the actors are really just not into it or if their lines and parts are just so bizarrely uninspired that they have nothing to work with. This is set up like Magnificent Seven in space, but statistically at least one of these characters should *accidentally* be compelling, but they're all really dull. So many things are hinted at and then never qualified or brought up again. In a film like this, at the very least the villain is usually memorable, and Ed Skrein is usually pretty good in those roles, but here even that is paper thin. This is one of those films where things just sort of happen and there doesn't seem to be a lot that connects one scene to another.
Of course this is a part one, and maybe part two will somehow develop the innumerable loose threads here. Maybe we'll actually see some chemistry build between the characters and begin to care about this struggle. But I kind of doubt it. There were just too many consistently missed opportunities here and indications that the writers have no understanding of how to build a story of this magnitude.