DEFCON 2012 (2010)

A film crew disappears while putting the finishing touches on a scifi film. The movies shows the near finished product about a group of space adventurers landing on Earth following a distress beacon and end up protecting a subterranean city from an alien invasion that was being set up since 2012.

Oh man....this movie was a total mess. You see the short synopsis? I had to watch the movie three times just to get the whole story of the film. Three times. The story is just all over the place. It gives the feeling that it has a lot it wants to tell, but when it gets told, it just came out as script diarrhea. Half of it are stories ties either left loose or just dropped off. We start up with a Black Ops. agent watching the movie. We're later reminded that we are watching a movie with a movie with a random shot of the DVD machine timer here and there. This should have been just a movie by itself without the black ops wraparound sequence. There was also no sense of urgency in the characters. No feeling of suspense.

 Most of it was in voice over after voice over after voice over telling us things which half should have been filmed. This was mainly due to no sound, because the abandoned mall they choose to shoot most the film in had a rat problem. It was such a problem, the squeaks from the rat hordes were registering on the boom mic. Other then that, the script has a lot of two dimensional characters walking, jumping and crawling all around the scenery.

On top of watching the movie three times to get a story out of it, I had to watch it three times because the sound was completely awful. Whoever mixed this was someone's cousin who just got a mixer. Sometimes the soundtrack was louder then the dialog. Other times background noise was louder then the foreground. And none of it was blended at all. And I don't mean for like a minute or two. It was half the damn movie!! It was that frustrating. Movies shouldn't be frustrating to watch.

That's not to say that this movie had a redeeming factor or two. The story tries to link up conspiracy theories with apocalyptic prophecies including the Mayan calendar and it somewhat works for the movie. It just gets covered and encrusted with voiceovers and redundancies in the script. You really have to work just to see the general idea.

Is it a must see? Not really. If you're bored and are a masochist, looking for a really bad movie trying to be good, go ahead and go for it.