Area 51 (2015)
Mr. Dark
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Starring Reid Warner, Jamel King, Ben Rovner, Jelena Nik
Directed by Oren Peli
A lot of you (Some of you? One or two of you? Mom?) know me for The Gasp Menagerie, Dread Central’s paranormal column. My lifelong interest in all things weird, including UFOlogy and government secrets, puts Area 51 square in my sights. Right up my alley.
Oren Peli, the man behind the original Paranormal Activity, filmed this shortly after PA shot to fame. He’s been tinkering with it ever since, with reshoots and script edits, right up until March or so when he declared it ready for launch.
He shouldn’t have bothered.
Even this self-professed expert on the subject just couldn’t get behind the movie. It’s a failure on almost all fronts.
First, I want to go over what he got right. The plot of the film couldn’t be more simple: Three friends plan to break into Area 51. That’s that. In a story that simple, you’re going to have a lot of references to the best-known site that doesn’t exist. It’s here where Area 51 shines the most.
Peli is definitely an Area 51 and UFOlogy/conspiracy nerd. The level of detail and accuracy shown here isn’t a matter of time spent on Google; it shows deep knowledge of the legends and lore of the base.
We actually see the legendary Area 51 employee JANET flights take off and land from McCarran. We see them at the terminal. We see cars pull out of the employee lot. George Knapp, the reporter who broke the Bob Lazar story in the 80’s, appears in a clip at the beginning of the film. We even spend time at the Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel, NV, and see actual “camo dudes” just past the entry point with the famous “deadly force” signs.
The story itself references a mishmash of lore. While it’s been rumored Area 51 is a front for an underground base, such tales are mostly focused on Dulce, NM, and China Lake in California. Area S4 isn’t a level of Area 51 as seen in the movie; it’s said to be a separate base for alien reverse engineering at Papoose Lake, several miles from Groom Lake/Area 51. That nugget comes from the Bob Lazar tale, and yes, we see what greatly resembles the “Sports Model” that Lazar claims he worked on.
The finale also plunders the famous David Icke tales of aggressive, unfriendly aliens sharing an underground base with US forces, only to turn on them. (I’d love to see a film of that complete story, with its different alien races and political intrigue, leading to catastrophe as humans are driven from their own base.)
So kudos for making what is by far the most accurate film on the subject. The lore is everywhere, and it’s accurate.
And thus ends what’s right about the film.
There was no way this was ever going to work. Ever. Period. This tale could never be an effective found-footage film. Unless you have 90 minutes of them prowling around the base, which wouldn’t be interesting but might at least be exciting.
What we have instead is a good hour or so of build-up and background. A little light burglary in a completely unnecessary scene that provides no tension (you know they’ll get away with it, or the movie ends) and wastes around ten minutes of screen time. A lot of driving around talking like early 20’s male friends. A bit of conspiracy skullduggery as they meet with the daughter of a man who claimed to have worked there, who provides them intel.
It feels like a whole lot of killing time, and it is. We have to do something before we reach the base, right? We don’t really learn much, and what we do is forced. When the guys reach the famous Little A’Le’Inn in Rachel, near Area 51, they find it populated by a bunch of random guys who (of course) spout all kinds of exposition about the site and what they really do there. Alien blood, reverse engineering, underground labs… and naturally every single one of these guys is 100% correct on everything they say. It could have been an interesting way to examine how many different theories there are about the place, but instead we get a heaping helping of pure exposition because these guys got their conspiracy theories by reading the script.
The only interesting segment during this build-up is a guided tour of the entry to the base by a character clearly based on the original “Desert Rat,” Glenn Campbell (not the singer), who once ran the first and biggest site on Area 51. This is where we see actual “camo dude” security guards, as they filmed on location. This is the closest we get to fiction crossing reality other than the visit to the exterior of the JANET terminal.
And then the absurdity train leaves the depot for a non-stop trip to the finale. The plan to dodge all of the security leading into what is arguably one of the most secure bases in the world is laughable, and of course it works. In the end, you have three 20-somethings in street clothes wandering through the base with relative impunity, defeating complex security measures to the world’s greatest secrets using techniques too laughable for a “Scooby-Doo” episode.
After some spooky and eventually violent run-ins with the things housed in the base, a chase begins and, just as abruptly, ends. This is definitely a movie that just stops; it doesn’t end. More than one person in my theater said, “Huh?” audibly when the credits appeared. Not in a questioning way, but rather in a “Well, that just happened” kind of way.
I think Peli is a talented guy. Paranormal Activity shows it. But this? Someone should have stepped in early on and asked him to map out the plot. I can’t believe anyone with a knowledge of film would have rubber stamped 2/3 of a film being scareless found-footage setup. It’s just dull as hell. Even the finale, if you disregard the absurdity of the entire concept, isn’t scary enough to warrant any build-up at all. Not a moment of it is as scary as any of the scares in PA.
Avoid this one unless you’re an obsessive conspiracy/Area 51 nerd. Even then, prepare to fast forward a lot.
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Film
Categorized:Reviews
