One Shot

It is so obvious the 'bad Aliens' are supposed to represent Muslims.. the ethnicity of the actors who play the parts of the aliens are of middle-eastern descent or closely resemble Arabs and middle-eastern. The way the female alien and the leader of the aliens are dressed clearly resembles that of tribes men and women. In my opinion whoever made this movie had an agenda... and it was anti-Muslim. Before anyone gets the idea I am Muslim and I am being over sensitive.. think again, I am an atheist and as far as I am concerned all religions are ridiculous. But what is even more ridiculous is someone making such a cringeworthy and obvious piece of anti-Muslim propaganda. To make things worse, it is a dreadful story line, really bad dialogue, poor production quality and badly acted. Watch it and decide for yourself.

I just watched it on Netflix. It's OK. The sci-fi part, I agree with some reviews, is not really present apart from the space station which doesn't play any interesting part in the movie.

It is slow at the beginning, I had to watch it with subs so the alien's translations could appear.

I liked the story, there is one indeed. The end is good too. Lots of killing, the alien race is rubbish at combat, it's almost boring to see them killed like mosquitos. The special effects aren't that creative but overall it was OK.

I suppose there's nothing wrong with wanting to make your own sci-fi action flick. If you have the means, even if not the absolute best of means, then why not? The special effects are actually pretty solid for the most part, though as is often the case, the more they dominate a scene the more unseemly they are. The production design and art direction are nothing special, but suitable such as they are. Action sequences are reasonably well done; all aspects of the technical craft are fine. James Schafer's music is decent in and of itself, though nothing to proverbially write home about.

From there the picture starts to become more suspect. Basically as soon as it begins one can only wonder what genre tropes it will or will not play with. That 'One shot' goes the 'Star Trek' route of making its non-human characters ("Ceruleans") look extremely human, with only scant cosmetic differences, is perhaps extra unfortunate here since the picture doesn't have any other qualities that really leap out. The costume design is but perfunctory, and equally uninspiring generally (blah blah military garb, blah blah civilian clothing). Specifically, a little worse is that from what we see of Cerulean civilians and their sartorial arrangements, and glimpses at their culture, their conception is nothing more than a direly weak, unimaginative, and somewhat dubious and unlearned borrow: "Hey, the Middle East is pretty alien, right? What if the Ceruleans were inspired by the Middle East?"

Meanwhile, I've seen more than a few titles from filmmaker John Lyde at this point, and I know him to be a capable filmmaker within those spaces he chooses for himself. It really seems in 'One shot' as though he's just phoning it in with his direction, cinematography, editing, and production - there's nothing wrong with it, but it's also perfectly unremarkable. More tired still is Adam Abram's screenplay. Characters are as empty as characters can be; dialogue is without exception dull and flat; scene writing is defined by these same traits. Plot is minimal, yet the more we get, the more it's cemented that the movie is doing nothing more than transplanting all the worst facets of "Joe Blow Know It All's vague, unsophisticated, mostly racist ideas of what Middle Eastern culture is" onto the Ceruleans, and all the most self-inflated, bloviating jingoist "Mission Accomplished" military bluster of the modern United States onto the humans in this unspecified future. There are notable themes on hand, but they are approached with no delicacy or care and quickly get lost in the mire.

Between Lyde's unbothered direction here, and even more so Abram's painfully hollow or even questionable writing, the cast have little to work with. They do the best they can, but it's not enough. All the while, 'One shot' fails to elicit a baseline level of interest, let alone thrills or impact. There are some good ideas here; they are misused, and amount to nothing. I didn't have high expectations when I sat to watch, yet still I'm disappointed by how profoundly middling this film is. There are bare-bones fragments of what could have been something good and worthwhile, but think of this as the cinematic equivalent of a leg whose weight-bearing bones have been completely shattered. Apologies to those who did work hard on 'One shot,' only for their contributions to result in something that trips over its own two left feet; commendations to those who watch this and find more value in it than I did. For my part, I simply can't recommend this - there are too many other flicks you could and should be watching instead.

My wife and I had finished watching something pretty good on N..F x (yes, that can happen), and she then called it a night while I decided to check out some stupid B (C or D) list action movie. I've sometimes been pleasantly surprised. Although usually not. This movie falls into the not category. Or make that NOT.

I gave it a rating of two only because I only give ones when I'm offended. This wasn't offensive. It was just all the other bad and irritating things a truly bad movie can be: boring, pointless, derivative, fake, cheap, slapdash, cheesy, cliché-ed and ... in the end ... barely having any claim to be either a war movie, or a sci-fi movie. I'm usually offended by attempts to become philosophically deep ... scenes thrown in to drive home some drively political "message". But this movie, while it almost tried, made such a lame attempt at it that it was basically inconsequential to the rest. Almost tried, is a good definition of this entire production. It doesn't even try.

This movie doesn't need a spoiler alert, because the ending is so obvious that even the premise and the description of the first 20 minutes gives away the ending.

Take away the so-called sci-fi touches, this is just an American sniper in -- someone suggested Afghanistan -- but definitely some middle eastern country, battling ISIS or the Taliban. His unit has been wiped out, and now he's alone and the only way to escape is to ... stay where he is and scan the desert region endlessly, and watch the camp of the bad guys, endlessly. If you removed the scenes of him looking through his scope and not seeing much of anything, you'd cut this movie down to an hour. Sometimes, just for whatever (to get a bit of food or water maybe) he goes down and attacks the camp, miraculously killing anyone he comes across. Nothing's believable. He's immortal. He can be in a firefight with 20 bad guys shooting at him with automatic rifles, and he takes them out with karate kicks, a pistol, or a knife. He actually gets captured at one point, that that of course was no problem. A slight diversion, and he's rescued.

Just for the sci-fi dimension, he's supposedly on some planet. For some reason, he's supposed to be a good guy, although you're left wondering how the good guys can be that, when they are the ones who have invaded this planet and the people who are there are "insurgents". There's no attempt to deal with this ambiguity. It's all just boo-rah ... including recuperating your dead.

The sci-fi thing is provided by some 2001 Space Odyseey command ship which, like a spy satellite, can watch the sniper's every move. But they don't do anything up there but comment on how great he is, or how he's in terrible danger all the time, and make plans to save him but never can for reasons that no one bothers to really explain. The actors playing the command ship scenes, which consists of some black painted plywood set, have nothing to say but ... well, there he is, getting into a cave, or there he is, running around, or whatever ... and the commander seems to know everything that is happening, including the sniper's motivations and plans. It's remarkable.

And remarkably lazy ... or just stupid ... writing. Some people call this sort of thing uninspired. But that's a term you'd use for someone who is perhaps capable of being inspired? This is obviously the level of writing you get from someone who is only capable of the most cliché-ed ideas. Nothing is original. And the director really can't do anything with it but throw in some lame fight scenes, long survey-the-desert sequences, and drop a few "alien"/human socio-cultural "exchanges. And there's a really bad guy, actually two ... a bad/bad alien guy who looks like he's straight out of Kabul, and the good/then bad human guy, to I guess show that this whole human adventure on this planet is bad? Or? ... And there's a very sexy alien princess this sniper is suddenly protecting, thrown in, to make sure there's SOME reason for the sniper to seem like a hero.

I get irritated when I see this sort of thing. OK, I get it. This provided work for some people. But ... wow ... what gets me is that these types of Netflix filler fodder aren't put through some sort of quality process. The writer of this thing should never be given any more money, ever, for full length movies. There are probably several hundred other aspiring writers who could have provided something more interesting. Or at least not so laughably cliché-ed.

I started to watch this lame excuse for a film on GREAT movies action on UK Freeview as I just needed an evening vegging out after a hard day at work. However, I was unable to relax as this film - called Sniper Elite in the UK - is woeful and irritatingly so. I enjoy trashy alien movies such as Cowboys vs Aliens. At least in that film they made and effort to make the alien soldiers look extra-terrestrial. The costume manager for this film probably got a job lot of SWAT uniforms at an army surplus store. The rest of the budget was probably spent on half a dozen tubes of Colgate blue gel toothpaste for the aliens' blue blood; a few cans of industrial black paint for the plywood set masquerading as the interior of a space station; some bedsheets out of which to make Arabic looking costumes for the non-military aliens. I doubt anything was spent on the cast as they had very little to do, except run around or look sincere/intense. To save the money spent on the army surplus gear and toothpaste the producers appear to have done away with the need for a screenwriter and director and let the actors ad lib lines. Of course, the aliens speak English/American. You know what? This film doesn't even deserve to have viewers wasting their time writing a review let alone watching this drivel. I actually gave up after 50 minutes. It's right down there with Jaws, The Revenge as one of the worst films I've ever seen.