2000s SF film
Silent Warnings, 2003, USA DIRECTED BY CHRISTIAN McINTIRE
A direct descendant - or perhaps clone is a better word - of M. Night Shyamalan's Signs, right down to the country house alongside a cornfield. The one memorable thing about this film is the opening sequence in which Stephen Baldwin plays a farmer who's clearly lost it, barricading himself indoors against aliens hiding in his fields. It's a decent sequence that deliberately imitates The X-Files for style and is then followed by an X-Files-lite title sequence. The movie really begins when a group of six college kids renovating the wrecked old farmhouse get drawn into discovering crop circles and the truth about the aliens. There's some chemistry between them, and Billy Zane makes a cool if unlikely Sheriff. So what goes wrong here, and where? While it keeps up the dark atmosphere well enough it's hard to pinpoint why it doesn't work other than the way it's clearly so derivative of bigger and better stuff, while frequently getting distracted into showing off its eye-candy cast. The biggest problem of all is how the aliens look cheap enough to have been done in the CGI artist's lunch break because they're laughably unconvincing. Scripted over just four days and filmed in Bulgaria over twelve, the film cost under a million dollars yet has that requisite Sci-Fi Channel made-for-TV feel about it, which at least ensures a certain level of quality yet it can't prevent the end result being rather forgettable. And there's also one important thing missing: an ending - how this film resolves itself is pretty lame at best.