Once the Heavies arrive back on the scene, Raisani uses their presence—and the way the military dispatches them—to dodge complexity in favor of shooting stuff for freedom’s last stand. It’s Starship Troopers without the irony. But it looks nice.
This first feature by Jabbar Raisani is played out with considerable conviction on the part of its director and the tough-guy cast (led by Rick Ravanello), but the alien element is less convincing because of corny costumes and static-y special effects.
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Slant MagazineEd Gonzalez
Slant MagazineEd Gonzalez
The film splits its time evenly between half-heartedly pretending it's an allegory for our current war on terror and pretending that it's not.
The promise of the multi-screen future-history info-dump that kicks off Alien Outpost isn't enough to mask this military sci-fi indie's repetitive familiarity.
The writing is so poor and the visual embellishments so few that some of the violence, like the frequent attacks on the base by local villagers, make little sense.
Alien Outpost doesn't even manage to do justice to its thematic conceits, failing to weave in its current day parallels in sufficiently thoughtful fashion.