Movies Seen Recently: Breach, Recon, Alien Expedition

Breach (2020) – This is not, as some IMDb commenters have said, the worst SF movie EVAR.  It is, however, far stupider than something with enough budget to hire Bruce Willis should be.

• First sign of stupidity: A huge ship is ready to blast off to take the last load of colonists from a doomed Earth. And to prevent the plebian hordes from storming and overrunning it, there’s… a chainlink fence at which security checks papers and lets people through one at a time while trying to keep the rabble out.
• Second sign of stupidity: After launch, all but a skeleton crew are put into suspended animation… Which means that they have to have room for all these moving, breathing people aboard the ship.  Maybe put them in suspended animation FIRST and load them up so you can stack their pods like cordwood and not waste space?
• Third sign of stupidity: Speaking of wasted space, the suspended animation pods are about one of two per (fully pressurized) room.
• Fourth sign of stupidity: Speaking MORE of wasted space, the corridors of the ship are octagonal, with only the flat bottom being a usable walkway. That means fully half of the corridors’ volume is wasted space.  I hereby condemn the set designers to a six-month stint on a submarine to figure out how you have to economize on space in a pressurized environment.
• Fifth sign of stupidity: The skeleton crew is comprised of thirty people, of whom a half-dozen are janitorial staff.  HOW MESSY ARE THE REMAINING TWENTY-FOUR???

And that’s all in the first ten minutes.  No, it doesn’t get any smarter.

Recon (2019) – In the waning days of WWII, four war-weary G.I.s in the cold mountains of Italy are sent on useless scouting mission over the mountain.  Along the way, they pick up an old Italian partisan — and he’s played by Franco Nero, who’s now so old he can just let his wrinkles do the acting.

It’s a grey and bleak environment for a grey and bleak movie, with the four young Americans having gotten old ahead of their years, showing shell-shock and burgeoning psychoses, just trying to trudge through their mission and stay alive to get back home.  It’s sort of like the best parts of all three Saints & Soldiers movies.

Alien Expedition (aka Jurassic Expedition) (2018) – In an appropriate counterpoint to Breach, this movie proves that you don’t have to spend truckloads of cash to make an embarrassingly stupid sci-fi movie.  The resources available to indie SF filmmakers mean you can make a dumb movie with acceptable SFX for a pittance!  Stupidities here include:

• A planetary landing craft without any sort of “force shield” which is about as aerodynamic as two shipping containers strapped to a Winnebago. No wonder they almost burned up on entry.
• A landing party of six who are supposed to check the planet for signs of intelligent life and/or exploitable resources — but their ship is supposed to stay where it landed, and they have one jeep to explore with. And they’re supposed to be there for 4000 hours (that’s 166 days).  
• One of the  is an android who inexplicably cries out in pain when wounded and wraps her injury in gauze.
• The three security grunts in the party are “enhanced,” which means they have exposed wires connecting eyegear and cobbled-together armor; however, they don’t show themselves to be any better at aim, reconnaissance, etc., than unenhanced stupid humans.
• Where they land (in a desert, boulderish area outside of L.A., one assumes), they discover dirt roads in the sagebrush. Their reaction: “There are roads here. Huh.”
• They also discover that Dune-style worms move under the surface and emerge to eat birds.  Their reaction: “Huh.”
• One crew member wanders off and is “beamed up.” By what? Dunno.  No alien presence is ever intimated, suspected, or explored. Despite the roads.
• The whole area is crawling with bad SGI theropods (thus the alternate title) which can vanish like the Predator. What do they eat? Boulders? Dunno.

But at least they didn’t waste eleventy-billion dollars like Breach.