Starring Riz Ahmed, Octavia Spencer

Directed by Michael Pearce

Prime Video, available now

Contains (essential) spoilers!

A decorated Marine goes on a rescue mission to save his two sons from an unhuman threat.

The great Russian playwright Anton Chekhov famously posited: ‘One must never place a loaded rifle on the stage if it isn’t going to go off. It’s wrong to make promises you don’t mean to keep.’

Director Michael Pearce, along with his co-writer Joe Barton, would have been wise to have heeded Mr C’s warning before committing their latest film, Encounter to digital celluloid, and drawing in doubtless thousands – if not millions of hopeful Sci-fi addicts with its promise of alien invasion. Amazon Prime bills the movie as at the top of this review. Encounter’s Wikipedia entry describes it as a ‘sci-fi thriller’.

The film starts promisingly. Mysterious extra terrestrial objects sear flaming trails through the atmosphere. A mosquito implants a malevolent looking micro-creature into Riz Ahmed’s bloodstream.

I love Riz Ahmed. In this reviewer’s opinion he is one of our finest screen actors, and if Riz is going to save the planet from alien invaders, even if he is being accused of being delusional and paranoid, then I’m in!

Except – and here’s the spoiler, so look away now if you are not a sci-fi addict – there are no aliens. Indeed there is no science fiction content to this movie whatsoever. They hung the sci-fi rifle on the wall, and then aside from a dwindling number of references as the movie progresses, it just hangs there collecting narrative sci-fi dust. Turns out it wasn’t even loaded.

At one point I wailed at the telly: ‘Where are the aliens?!! There have to be aliens!!’ My wife just looked at me pityingly.

So, is it a good movie despite the heinous fraud it commits on the audience to whom it has been marketed? Well… it’s hard for me to be objective. Hell hath no fury like someone who has been promised aliens but doesn’t get any aliens.

It’s basically an average social worker movie. Octavia Spencer (excellent as ever) tips up as Riz’s parole officer, along with some mainly good-hearted FBI agents. Riz does his best with a mediocre script and his two talented child co-stars, Lucian-River Chauhan and Aditya Gaddada, both turn in engaging performances that make the film broadly watchable. I hope we will be seeing more of them in better movies in the future.

But… but… but… there are no aliens, and I’m in a sulk about that because that was the film I sat down to watch, and with those actors it was shaping up to be something well worth 100 minutes of my time, a Friday night sci-fi treat I had been looking forward to all week.

As my Sci-Fi Bulletin colleague Nick Joy succinctly put it, reassuring me that I wasn’t alone in my frustration: ‘They wrote the wrong script’.

5/10

Martin Jameson