Area 51
M**L
X-Files Meets The Blair Witch: EXCELLENT!
Here's the thing: If you love found footage horror and the X-Files then ignore all the negative reviews and RENT THIS MOVIE. For us ff & X-Files lovers, this is an extremely polished film to enjoy. I rented it twice. The negative reviews here are all so uniformely monosyllabic that I sorta wonder if some rival filmmaker didn't hire one of those marketing companies to just come and trash this movie on Amazon for the sole purpose of artificially degrading its overall rating.If you watch as many found footage movies as I do, what you're probably looking for is an interesting to build up to the action sequences in the movie. This movie gives us a very unusual and unsettling introductory act involving house burglary and some creepy backroom government stuff while introducing the characters and their plot to break into Area 51. What I like most about this part of the movie is how seriously the characters seemed to treat the prospect of breaking into Area 51. Most movies and even some of the episodes of the X-Files seemed to make light of the idea of Area 51 and the prospect of a substantive alien encounter or successful breach of the base.This movie takes the subject seriously which is really refreshing. It's very scary, the CGI is impressive, and for the first time in film history we get a relatively unobstructed look at what it might actually be like to break into Area 51.The found footage conceit worked extremely effectively for this type of movie. Like some others more recent in the found footage subgenre, this movie uses a number of go pro and held multiview cameras where you get several views of the same action sequence all from different parts of the body from the same person. It's a "Go-Pro" found footage movie, if you're deep enough into the subgenre to get my drift.Anyway, I was really impressed with this film, I have absolutely no clue where the one star reviews are coming from; part of me wonders if some of them just don't understand the intent of the found footage horror movie: it's supposed to look sort of choppy and poorly put together in the very sort of un-edited way you'd expect to find actual found footage! It's not supposed to look like an A-list Hollywood blockbuster, in fact, if it did, all of the mysterious low-budget charm would disappear. And actually, if that were the case, I'm sure these one star reviews would find something else to gripe about; they just seem like the sort of people who won't like any movie for any reason unless it is a number one box office hit where the plot is spoonfed to the audience and the budget for the movie exceeded $200 million ha ha. Just rent this movie...you will be pleasantly and genuinely unsettled amd scared amd excited all at the same time. Then go binge-watch the first five-to-seven seasons of the X-Files...The truth IS out there! Thank you.
J**N
The best alien found footage movie
If you guys are Area 51 fanatics and theorists, and love Alien movies and all things ufo, then please buy this movie now. Area 51 is my most favorite movie it’s the best alien found footage movie out there to date . Please buy this and watch it definitely a great make and well executed story line .
C**B
Pleasantly surprising
Way better quality than I expected. Little slow to start though.
D**N
:)
It's a bit of a guilty pleasure movie for me, honestly. Area 51 I first saw a few months after it was released back in 2015. I got a digital copy of it. It's a great movie. I honestly didn't find it to be cheesy or mediocre.It has a fairly likable cast to it. The story was well paced and it didn't overstay it's welcome. I'm honestly just fascinated with this movie.Give it a try if you haven't. It's not the worst time you'll ever spend.
M**S
Wish I could rewind the last hour & 31 minutes of my life that I just wasted watching this drivel
The screenwriter who used Google to "research" this idea for what turned out to be a half-baked screenplay should also have Googled "how to write a fluid, interesting, unpredictable screenplay." Very choppy script, and it's not because of the point-of-view style of filming. It's simply a very weak script based on an interesting premise. The POV isn't all over the place most of the time and the actors are actually good, given the terrible material with which they had to work.Kept waiting for something scary or suspenseful or even just interesting to happen. Not scary. Not suspenseful. Definitely totally uninteresting from the start, but I thought perhaps it would get better. It didn't. Didn't get much worse, just stayed at a steady, watch-the-grass-grow level of interest. Spoiler alert: Gratuitous nudity: they test some kind of body cam in a strip club (they could've tested the night vision anywhere, like outside, at night, sans lap dance girls - don't get too excited, guys, because even the strip club scene was boring, but at least it was short) and at the beginning of the film, one of the lead hot guys shows his bum when he strips down and jumps into a pool during a party scene that, aside from brief shot of hot guy's bum, was too long and boring.Long and boring seems to be the theme of this film. Totally predictable, unrealistic scenario. Apparently, once one manages to dogde high tech motion and heat sensors, helicopter patrols, "camo guy" patrols, and electric fences, and is able to get into Area 51, there are only five or six guards aimlessly wandering around outside. Once inside one of the supposedly ominous hangars, a fingerprint that was lifted from a cologne bottle with sticky tape magically opens doors, along with a stolen securty badge that was obtained in another excruciatingly too long, boring, and unrealistic scenario. Nary a guard or employee inside for the most part, until near the end, and that encounter makes absolutely no sense. Guards with weapons suddenly appear and seem to catch body cam guy, who is of course separated from the others. Cut to the others and their supposed-to-be-horrifying encounter that is actually just weird and yep, boring. Cut back to body cam guy, running, alone, apparently having somehow managed to escape armed guards, and ... well, if you get this far into the film, you're near the end and I hope you're at least enjoying an adult beverage or three and some popcorn, neither of which I had.Regarding the aliens - spoiler alert two: ya don't get to see more than a brief shot of 'em and what you see is groan-worthy. Kept waiting for an alien in a white hocky mask, weilding a chainsaw and spitting acid blood to suddenly appear. At least that would've been marginally entertaining.This film was a complete letdown, right up to the abrupt, predictably inane ending. Utterly boring film that is an excellent remedy for insomnia if one doesn't want to take a sleeping pill. Mostly likely, if one did take a sleeping pill with bizarre side effects, like sleep walking, sleep eating, and hallucinations, it would be far more interesting than this movie. Only 'pluses' to this film are the aforementioned insomnia cure and no overt body fluid leakage shots, such as the up-the-nostril-snot-shot in "The Blair Witch Project." *Yawn*
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