Starring Kyle Gallner, Azura Skye, Mary McCormack, Richard Schiff, Graham Hamilton, Aaron Behr, Neil Arnote and Noah Scott

Written and directed by Michael G. Cooney

Alex Jacobs (Kyle Gallner) is a disgraced cryptographer. A.R.I.S.T. agent Rebecca Stillma  (Mary McCormack) hires him to decrypt a message found in a satellite. One that shouldn’t be in orbit…

There’s an interesting tendency I’m seeing in low budget SF movies like this to compensate for the small scale of the budget with massive ideas, and lots of them. It’s to be applauded, and in the case of movies like Things Will Be Different it works brilliantly. This is a little less successful but also worth your time.

Gallner, who’s at the top of folks’ minds at the moment due to his cameo in Smile 2, is always good fun and he gets to do some fun stuff in this one. Alex is a delightfully skeezy rat of a man, and because Gallner is brilliant at what he does, we see that he knows that. The nature of his disgrace, and why Rebecca picked him, are at least as important as the message and Gallner’s called on to do more and more as the movie goes on. Gallner’s up for it, even if the movie sometimes struggles to be and he’s the thumping, panicky, sleep deprived heart of the movie.

Beth Carter (Azura Skye) is the other side of Alex’s coin. Another cryptographer, Beth is further along in the process, and further down the rabbit hole, than Alex and the movie’s best sequences are where the two compare notes. Two brilliant, possibly doomed people, working a problem from both ends and discovering more than they expect is always a good time and this is a really, really good time. Cooney writes dialogue very well, and his cast are more than up to it. The big ideas that work here work because of these two – and the way Cooney’s script moves through UFO iconography into something richer and stranger is smart and elegant, the movie pirouetting on the few dimes in its budget. Top marks to McCormack and Schiff too, the two West Wing alumni doing excellent work as a spy and a scientist with other pieces of the puzzle.

That puzzle is what drives the movie and it’s also what, in the end, doesn’t quite work. The back third asks a vast amount of the characters and a lot of the viewers. The big ideas all land but there’s a section which is pretty much just those big ideas being explained at length. Some viewers will find that pretentious. Others will be bored. I’m not either, but I did find my attention waning after the tense, driving first hour.

Verdict: Nonetheless, Alien Code is a fun, ambitious movie with great performances. It doesn’t hit every mark it aims for, but it hits more than enough. 8/10

Alasdair Stuart

Alien Code is also known as The Men. It’s on Amazon Prime now.