Bullet Points: AE Apocalypse Earth

You shouldn’t always need a reason to talk about Adrian Paul but I have one anyways; today is his birthday! So head over to @AdrianPaul1 on Twitter and wish him a happy one while you’re sitting there, I’ll wait…

Ok, now that the pleasantries are out of the way I thought it would be fun to review one of Paul’s newer flicks that is currently streaming on Netflix. Let’s check out AE: Apocalypse Earth. I bet it’s gonna be the next Godfather! Oh shit…it’s made by the Asylum…not a good start.

The Gist: The Earth is under serious attack by an unknown alien race and the remaining members of the human race have boarded ships en route to habitable planets all over the place. One such ship contains a group of survivors who are forced to fight against a race of aliens who use cloaking devices and have been capturing other living creatures. Lt. Frank Baum (Adrian Paul) must unite the survivors in an all out battle for their lives.

The Cast: Just once, I want to see Adrian Paul pick up a sword in a non-Highlander film and cleverly nod while he hacks the head off of an enemy. Is that too much to ask? At least that would make the movie more enjoyable than some of the stuff we are forced to sit through here. Not all of the actors struggled through the movie. To be honest, the performances by the actors were the best part of the movie for me. Even the guy who played fake DATA was decent enough for an Asylum picture. Paul plays the rugged military vet who appears to be the only one except for Sgt. Peebles (shit name) that doesn’t totally suck at survival until they meet a supermodel who was spray painted and wandered off into the jungle. Her name is Bali Rodriguez and even under all that paint she is still quite the stunner. My hopes that the sweat would ruin her paint job or maybe some thigh would show never came to pass but she did alright for this being her only film credit on IMDb.com.

They cover a fair amount of stereotypes with the survivors, including TIM, who is actually just DATA from Star Trek.

The Villain: Note to all filmmakers: If your main villain is an alien race who uses a cloaking device and they aren’t Predators and you never actually see them without their cloaking device then you should just make the twist be all of the characters are crazy and fighting imaginary aliens. You could have made them children or just insane people in an Asylum. Hey, that’s the name of the production company!

There are no pictures of the villains so here is Richard Grieco and Adrian Paul together; Booker and Duncan Team Up!

The Action: It’s difficult to make a solid action sequence when the actors are fighting thin air. I might as well have watched a 90 minute video of my dad wafting his farts down a hallway. It was almost as if they were going to put some aliens in the film during post-production but they were just like, “Fuck it. Just put a smudge on the picture and we’ll say they were all camouflaged.” I’m not sure who the alien teeth on the poster belong to because we never actually see what the bad guys look like. Looking back, the aliens were also pretty terrible at killing the 10 survivors and I’m not sure how they were able to destroy an entire planet full of them. Maybe Asylum needs to release a prequel where we see all of the militaries of the world join forces to fight an imaginary enemy but just destroy themselves in the process.

That looks like something that I Photoshopped.

Take it Home:

• Adrian Paul- Giant Lizard Slayer: I would watch that in a heartbeat.
• Not cool Adrian: There is definitely something wrong with getting busy with the hot alien chick in their drinking water, then watching them all drink it. Ewwww.
• “Move on two”: Who the hell moves on two?!? That was the least plausible part of the movie for me.
• Hey, there you are: Someone found Richard Grieco and paid him to be in the movie.
• Shyamalan twist: MEGA SPOILER HERE- They were on Earth the whole time! Imagine that. Instead of the Statue of Liberty gimmick they do a decent Mt. Rushmore one instead. It was pretty uninspired but what makes it even worse is that the tagline on the poster says, “The Battle for Mankind will not be on Earth”.
• Interstellar: Strangely enough, this movie has several similarities to the Chris Nolan film Interstellar. They talk several times about the theory of relativity and Adrian Paul making it back to Earth before too much time passes and his daughter dies of old age or something. Maybe I was trying too hard to find something of value but it did seem strange since this movie came out in 2013.

Rating: 2/5