Occupation Movie Review

Occupation (2017)

Rent Occupation on Amazon Video
Written by: Luke Sparke, Felix Williamson (additional dialogue)
Directed by: Luke Sparke
Starring: Dan Ewing, Temuera Morrison, Stephany Jacobsen
Rated: R
Watch the trailer

Plot
A small group of Australians have to band together after an alien attack. As they struggle to survive, they realize they must stay one step ahead of their attackers, and work together for a chance to strike back.

Verdict
It's bland. The characters are nothing more than tropes and the story relies on even more tropes to progress. There's nothing to see here.
Skip it.

Review
An opening monologue demanding an alien war and talking about an alien threat is from a Ronald Reagn speech to the UN. The narration seemed crazy with what seemed like a political figure. It's even crazier my guess was correct. It's a high point of the movie that has a loose connection to the actual movie.

We're introduced to the character with a lot of foreshadowing, characters assuring each other nothing could happen in this town. It's a small town and each of the main characters is linked somehow.

Alien come out guns blazing.

I like how the group was formed. They're trying to escape and happen on a family in an RV who urges everyone to join them.

A big issue is that I never had a sense of scale. Are the aliens taking over the planet or just Australia? Why doesn't anyone turn on a radio to figure out what's going on? No one even calls for help, they just hide out.

The group is on the run from aliens, hitting the floor whenever they see light. A teenage girl manages to overpower an alien. The aliens seemed tough, up until that point.

One of the group removes the alien helmet and sees that it has some heat tracking optics, but the image is so blurry it's no wonder the aliens are such bad shots. The character also states being in the woods makes them invisible. I wasn't able to sort out how since the image in the helmet doesn't reinforce that and the aliens are able to find them just fine.

This group manages to fight back. They are a wrecking crew. That's when the aliens call in a dude with a cape. When you see someone with a cape you know they're important.

At one point the group captures an alien and the way it's portrayed we feel some sympathy with the alien, but the movie never explores that topic. It could be an interesting moral question, but this movie throws a lot out there without doing anything with it. We have all these characters that are nothing more than tropes with the hope we'll connect to at least one of them despite no reason to do so.

I was really hoping the big twist would be that Earth food is a delicacy and that was the reason for the invasion. Nothing that fun happens.
A homeless man and a teenage girl develop a relationship which was never less than strange, mainly due to the perceived age difference. It's a weird dynamic.

This movie likes crosscutting between scenes. It makes you think these scenes are more important or are related to the central them of the plot, but it's just nonsense. It's meant to pile on but there's no meaning to it. That just doesn't work.

The military comes in to save the day which removed any sense of danger or tension. That also marked the demise of any hope I had for character development. The military is planning an assault and at this point I checked out mentally.

At one point the movie quotes Terminator, "Come with me if you want to live." Since the movie brought it up, it's admissible. Terminator developed the characters of Reese and Sarah. It didn't just tell us she's a waitress, it showed us a day in her life. It's the same for Reese. We're told he's a soldier and tactfully see it. We also see his motivation for a suicide mission. His actions are logical. Occupation does nothing like that all to its detriment.