Alone in the Dark -- 2005 -- R

When I got this movie to experience more Uwe Boll moviemaking, I didn't have high expectations. I just wanted to see what all the negative fuss was about.

We start with this nearly two minute opening text crawl that someone reads to us. It goes on to tell us about this ancient Native American civilization that opened a pathway between worlds or something, and then a scientist who conducted experiments on orphans. Yes, they felt that dissimilar when I was watching it too.

The movie opens with a kid running from something. Then we get a subtitle in a following scene stating something is 22 years earlier. I was thinking we saw this kid running and then something else was happening 22 years before that? No, it was supposed to be 22 years before now... Of course, you're not supposed to start a movie indicating a flashback, because nothing else has happened yet for it to flashback from.

The plot made a good effort, but could never really make total sense. Some of it did. I followed that when the gold box was opened, it activated these things in people's heads making them zombie-ish...which doesn't explain why we had one acting this way at the beginning. It also never explained where these big nasty Alien-style creatures came from. It wants to imply the "dark world," but we learn that the dark world is sealed...so where did they come from? No clue.

A lot of the dialogue was cliche or wooden or poorly delivered. They were easy to understand, but in most cases that was it. Tara Reid was obviously hired for the pretty face, but rather unconvincing as an archaeologist. The antagonizing 713 guy, Burke, was over the top in antagonizing the hero, Edward. He even asked during an early meeting what he was doing there. Like a museum is off limits or something.

Also had some confusing continuity, especially when the troops surround some factory thing that has a mine in its basement (I guess). We cut back and forth between those in the mine and those outside. Why didn't they hole up in the facory and give the things less room to move? Dunno. When we get down to a few troops remaining, we get more confusing. At one point there is a guy walking somewhere...we don't know where. At another point, a soldier walks up a flight of stairs (I think), and then emerges back on the ground floor. The soldiers inexplicably split up. What happened to safety in numbers.

We also had at an earlier point some soldiers walking through an upstairs area of a loft or something, and we thing something is going to happen to them. They are "on their own," but we cut away from them never to return.

When our heroes are in the mine, they run into these worm things. They are clearly very dangerous, but they allow one to emerge from the sand...slowly. Open its mouth...menacingly. And then chomp down on someone's leg before they open fire. Seriously. And when one of the big creatures is chasing our heroes, it continually pauses to let them get ahead of it. It could have kept going, but just didn't.

Basically, it all felt like a bad retread of Aliens without all the wonderful backstory and character development that James Cameron put into that one. We never get a full explanation of what's going on. We get told that our own government did it to us, but that reasoning makes no sense in the bigger picture. For mindless entertainment, it works all right. If you try to figure out what's going on, it falls apart completely.