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mrevis
Reviews
Unidentified (2006)
Awful, awful, awful! Stinker of the millennium!
How awful is it? Let me count the ways: 1) It is a bait-and-switch movie that starts out being about a UFO investigation, then turns into a high-pressure sales job for Christianity. C'mon! If the makers of this movie felt so strongly about their message, why disguise it? It annoys non-believers and pushes fence-sitters in the opposite direction. 2) It's not even a good sales pitch! If the characters in this flick asked me to go to church with them, I'd run like Hell in the opposite direction. They're scary! 3) The acting is terrible. They all behave as if they were in an educational film about etiquette in the workplace. 4) The cinematography is home-movie bad. Wait, actually its not even that good. 5) Script bad, bad, bad. All dialogue, no action. Like a tennis match, they bounce back and forth between the "talking head" close ups. 6) Direction... what direction? Oh, there must have been a director there somewhere. I challenge you to figure out where.
Believe it or not, I have some positive comments about this movie. The editing seemed professional, but couldn't make a difference. A good edit of bad material is still a bad movie. The opening theme music was actually very good! Very scary and UFO-ish. Too bad the movie wasn't about UFOs.
If you can't tell already, here's the bottom line. I wasted my money seeing this movie, and it made me angry. If they had not disguised what this movie was really about, I could say it was my fault.
The X Files: Jose Chung's 'From Outer Space' (1996)
I agree, best episode ever
I love the witty and well-researched script by Darin Morgan. Everything you see and hear in this episode has a hidden meaning, be it a joke, a tribute to another sci-fi movie or a tribute to an obscure UFO researcher from the 60's. In fact, the entire episode seems to be a tribute to 'Pale Fire', written by Vladimir Nabokov. At any rate, in my opinion, the script was brilliant and also was brilliantly executed by director Rob Bowman (Hmmm... is 'Bowman' his real name or is it a tribute to Kubrick & Clarke's '2001: A Space Odyssey'? Food for thought.) There's so much more I could write about this episode, but I think instead I'll pop it in the DVD and watch it again.
P.S. Charles Nelson Reilly's Jose Chung character appears again in an episode of the 2nd season of Chris Carter's 'Millennium', in another truly brilliant Darin Morgan script.