Extraterrestrial (2014)

Five young people, a cabin, a bag of marijuana, and a spacecraft. The ingredients have been assembled many times before, and Colin Minihan's 2014 effort does not disturb the recipe. What it offers is a brisk, mean-spirited exercise in alien abduction that concludes with the United States military executing the survivors and burning the bodies in a pit. That is a bleak curtain, and it arrives without a shred of moral instruction attached. The film has no thesis about the world we live in, which in this genre counts as a small mercy.

On the matter of representation, the ensemble is uniformly young, white, and interchangeable, assembled to standard genre specifications and nothing beyond them. The women exist to be abducted, to be locked in basements for their own protection, and in one case to swallow sleeping pills as a solution to the plot. No critique of the arrangements that place them there is offered, only the arrangements themselves. There is no queer presence, no engagement with race, no environmental subtext in all those trees, no argument about money or power. The aliens are not standing in for anything. They are simply aliens, which is restful.

Where the film gestures toward hidden truths, it reaches for the well-worn Roswell treaty, a conspiracy in which the government has spent decades concealing its arrangement with visitors. Michael Ironside explains this at a kitchen table, and then the screenplay moves along. The exposition is functional, not sermonizing, and the film never pauses to tell its audience how to feel about any of it. The result is a lean, unpleasant, largely unremarkable thriller with no ideological ambitions whatsoever. A modest vintage. Low yield. Drink it in the dark, if at all.