Rim of the World (2019)

Here is a film that assembles its young cast the way a marketing department assembles a focus group, and then asks them to outrun an alien invasion. McG's 2019 Netflix production follows four adolescents stranded at a southern California summer camp when the extraterrestrials arrive: a grieving white boy, a wealthy Iranian-American boy, a Black boy on the run from juvenile hall, and a non-verbal orphan girl from China who, conveniently, can drive a manual transmission. The demographic arithmetic is impeccable. The screenplay, however, treats this arrangement as unremarkable, and so should we. Nobody remarks on race. Nobody remarks on much of anything, because there is a mothership to destroy.

The film's most substantive gesture toward contemporary social awareness is its handling of Gabriel's dyscalculia, which lands him unjustly in juvenile detention after a customer misreads his error at a deposit box. Zhen Zhen's non-verbal communication is presented plainly, without fanfare or explanation. These are small, competent touches. Elsewhere the film gestures at economic grievance, what with a failed car dealership and a black-market scheme involving the alien key, but it never builds a thesis from the rubble. The apocalypse, notably, is extraterrestrial in origin. No glacier melts. No corporation is indicted. The villain is a masked thief with a knife and a business plan.

What we have, then, is a breezy 1980s pastiche that occasionally remembers it was made in 2019 and adjusts its collar. It encourages empathy among misfits, briefly. It lets a girl start the generators and insert a key, then hands the emotional climax back to the boys. Critics were unkind. The film was watched anyway, in enormous numbers, which tells us something about the audience that no amount of demographic engineering can fully explain.