Captive State is the most boring alien invasion movie since Battle: Los Angeles. Probably more so, because at least Battle: LA was peppered with action sequences, however incoherent and unmemorable they were.
I was genuinely intrigued by this film's original trailer. The concept—lower-class Chicagoans attempt to form an insurgency against extraterrestrial rule which took over the planet a decade prior—is not wildly original, but the alien designs (from what little we saw) seemed unique, and the human sociopolitical element looked to bring a slightly different flavor to the genre.
Unfortunately, Captive State is so focused on being grounded, gritty, and filled to the brim with government surveillance jargon that it basically forgets to have any characters. I mean, sure; there are people in the film with names that you learn (and quickly forget) who do things on screen and carry the story from one plot point to the next. But interactions between these people are so brief and loosely chopped together that there's hardly a chance to get to really know who they are. As a result, what we're left with is a series of incredibly depressing and unengaging vignettes of how miserable life is under these distant and cold-hearted alien tyrants... with no human magnets for empathy as a viewer.
The acting, for what it's worth, is pretty strong. The ensemble of heroes, consisting of relative unknowns—Ashton Sanders (Moonlight), Jonathon Majors, Madeline Brewer, and Ben Daniels, among a dozen others who play other no-name characters—give energized, battered performances as people at the end of their rope. But without names, personalities, or chemistry to flesh them out beyond their "fight back against the oppressor" motivations, the performances serve only as pretty icing on a cardboard cake.
John Goodman is fine, I guess, but there isn't a whole lot for him to do but play "mean government man" the whole time. Vera Farmiga is criminally underused, especially given her vague hints at an interesting character. Machine Gun Kelly is apparently in this movie, which is something I clearly missed. Sorry.
Captive State isn't some terrible abomination of film. It's not incompetent. It's just mind-numbingly boring. I couldn't tell you what anyone's arc was, or their relationships with one another (except two of them were brothers), or if there was a lesson I was supposed to learn from it. There were just too many "characters" sharing the screen, none of them interesting enough to keep me engaged during the "tense" sequences of revolution. Add to that the knockoff Paul Greengrass-style of cinematography and editing, and you have a film that is not only hard to follow, but hard to want to.
To make matters worse, there was barely any cool alien stuff. And that would have been fine if this film succeeded in taking a cathartic human perspective like it so clearly wanted to. But instead, we get very little emotional intrigue and very little cool alien stuff. Put two and two together and you get very little movie. Next.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=i68xCzI406A&w=585