Alienate Blu-ray Movie

Rating summary

Movie		0.5
Video		2.5
Audio		2.5
Extras		0.5
Overall		1.5

Alienate Blu-ray Movie Review

I survived an alien invasion and all I got was this lousy movie.

Reviewed by Martin Liebman July 23, 2019

The Blu-ray box art for Alienate is certainly enticing. It depicts a machine gunner from a rearward perspective sitting in the back of some aircraft, the cargo bay doors opened and showing a city aflame, a battlefield between man and extraterrestrials. A critic blurb that promises "gripping Sci-Fi" appears at the bottom. The quote is not attributed to anybody, which should be a glaring neon warning sign to any and all who might be otherwise drawn to the movie's advertisement. It is in fact not an action-oriented movie. It's a microscopically budgeted Sci-Fi film that all but abandons scope in favor of a more cheaply produced character driven narrative. Unfortunately it's not at all enticing or engaging from that perspective either, leaving the movie adrift in nothingness and alongside similar genre flotsam and jetsam. The movie obviously means well, and even ends on a high note, but it's next to impossible to care by then.

Watch the skies...watch anything besides this movie.

Aliens have invaded Earth. The streets are littered with dead bodies. In the skies, fighter jets battle alien craft. The story follows a young man named David (Blake Webb) and his search for his wife, Amy (Tatum Langton). The two had a falling out prior to the invasion. The film fills in the details in a number of flashbacks. Planes are crashing from the sky. Cell towers are down. As David treks back to the city to find Amy, he finds himself in the midst of history changing events and engaged in a seemingly hopeless task.

The story is not a non-starter, but the execution is not up to even the most modest of cinema standards. It’s not entirely amateur hour in Alienate, but this is certainly an extremely low budget movie made without the benefit of superior technical know-how, whether behind the camera, in front of it, in the writers' room, or in the editing process. It is a slow, laborious film with no dramatic rhythm and a dearth of engaging characters; there’s zero reason to invest in either one. In fact, if anyone knows a character’s name at film’s end, they deserve a prize. And a jackpot for anyone who legitimately feels a connection to or concern for them.

The film has no single obstacle. Everything contributes to its total failure: the budget restraints, the pacing, the visual effects, and perhaps most notably the impossibly vacuous characterization. The movie attempts to weave in character backstory throughout, intermixed with shoddily constructed scenes of the alien apocalypse and the struggle to survive. At issue is the vicious cycle, that the characters are so poorly and simplistically constructed and wanting for even a hint of a reason to remain engaged in their story and the backdrop of alien invasion so shoddily made and lacking dramatic might that neither gives reason for the audience to care about the other. In short: it's just flat-out boring. Shockingly, fully, relentlessly boring.

Alienate Blu-ray Movie, Video Quality 

Alienate lands on Blu-ray with a 1080p transfer that appears on a burned BD-R disc. The movie's modest visuals are on display throughout. Gravitas Ventures' 1080p transfer appears relatively accurate considering what appears to be faithfulness to a fairly bland, unassuming source. There's little feel for post-production enhancement and not much in-camera capability, either. The picture finds adequate texturing and decent enough color, but it's also flat, limited in both its ability to present details with the firmness and razor-sharp accuracy fans expect form the format as well as more nuanced and impressively saturated colors. Skin textures are never intimately revealing, clothes lack more than essential definition, and environments want for improved sharpness and immersive clarity. Colors are flat and lifeless, even under bright sun. Black levels are thin and gray, and there are too many nighttime scenes for this to be excused. Aliasing appears frequently. Macroblocking settles into solidly dark backgrounds. This is not at all a good looking movie and the Blu-ray is resultantly bland at best.

Alienate Blu-ray Movie, Audio Quality 

This Blu-ray release of Alienate features a DTS-HD Master Audio 5.1 lossless soundtrack. A symphony of news broadcast voices emanate from all around the listener over the black opening screen, building in volume as music rises. It's a generic but solidly presented sound effect that sets the movie's story in motion. The track is little shallow at reference volume, particularly concerning dialogue. It's almost whisper quiet. It's not as if the rest of the track is a dynamo powerhouse, but there's certainly an imbalance between speech and music and effects. Sound effect details are fair, seemingly more limited by the film's modest budget and lack of sophisticated sound design and less the Blu-ray audio encode (sounds like the video presentation). There's a decent feel of immersion and depth when a helicopter falls to the ground in chapter three, but the accompanying music is a bit thin. Alien "chittering," as the subtitles call it, emanates from around the stage here and there to decent effect, while alien laser blasts are likewise adequately detailed and find good stage presence and a feel for movement. Shotgun blasts in chapter seven, however, lack the thunder and low end might one would expect to hear. The track certainly gives an honest effort to make the most of the material, but fans should expect a low-budget audio experience for a low-budget movie and a budget-produced Blu-ray appearing on BD-R.

Alienate Blu-ray Movie, Special Features and Extras 

All that's included is the Alienate trailer (1080p, 1:26). No DVD or digital copies are included. This release does not ship with a slipcover.

Alienate Blu-ray Movie, Overall Score and Recommendation 

What a terribly boring and practically unwatchable movie. Alienate is an appropriate title; it's sure to alienate audiences suckered in by the false advertising, micro budget, shoddy production values, poor acting, absentee story, and zero-sum characters. It's a terrible movie watching experience from the top down. Nothing -- literally nothing -- about the movie is worth a lick or a dime or a second of one's time. It hurts to say that, because this reviewer both enjoys this sort of post-apocalyptic survival genre and prefers to find the silver lining in every movie, but there really isn't one here. Gravitas Ventures' Blu-ray is not quite as dismal as the film proper, but it's certainly forgettable. Lower end video and audio presentations are the result of lower end production values. The only extra is the film's trailer; it's not a surprise that there's nothing else. Wish this one away to a galaxy far, far away, hopefully back to wherever these aliens came from.