Waste of time

Thanks for the memories!

If you like to be scared, if you like to laugh, and if you like to learn a thing or two at the movies, this absolutely cannot be missed.

All of these films share one commonality, that being a kind of emotional center that humanizes a cast of monsters.

Alien and other species invading our planet! I adore these movies but this one was utterly ridiculous! Concern over aliens having votes on government issues in our society, living amongst us? Having 'rights'? Simply ludicrous!!! The acting was so over the top from both the children, their parents and the human-alien was diabolical!!! I watched this silly movie on Netflix and it's given me more reasons why I should unsubscribe! Bonkers!!!! Not worthy of 1 star but I've given it 2 simply because I felt sorry for the 2 children and their parents for the fees it cost for these children to attend drama classes! Diabolical!!!!

I really liked the approach of going for a small-scale character driven zombie flick. The reviews seem to be very divided between masterpiece and if-I-could-give-zero kind of comments. In my opinion, the actual rating (5.8 right now) represents exactly the score this one deserves. And here's why:A lot in here is pretty decent: Atmosphere, camerawork, effects and the acting are all very good. Matthew Fox steals the show and I always like to see he's doing a movie every now and then. Jeffrey Donovan is also pretty good, although there were little moments where I didn't buy his part, but that's rather to blame on the directing, which sometimes is pretty good and other times rather mediocre. But then, the writing...It's not particularly bad but the way this story is structured it just falls flat in the end. I think if they had done two or more script revisions they really could have nailed it. And I'm not even talking about inconsistencies like a sequence in which the characters load up on TONS of weapons just so one of them only has a single bullet to fire when he finally needs to. No, I'm talking about setting up and tieing up the subplots properly.Let's start at the beginning: Two men, a woman and a baby get caught up in the Zombiecalypse. She gets bitten. The guys and the baby survive. Cut to: Nine years later. The two guys live way out yonder in two seperate houses in the mountains hating each other while one of them, Jack (Donovan), struggles to be a father for his now 9-year-old daughter and the other guy, Patrick (Fox), is a drunken bum. At this point we are being kept in the dark of what happened and which of those two is actually the real father, because both of them seem to have had a close relationship with that woman back then.SPOILERS: Later, it turns out the woman didn't die at the beginning because they cut off her arm so she could live. Patrick is actually the girl's father and he used to live with his little family in one of those houses until he became jealous of Jack, accusing him and his wife of having an affair. So he picked up a drinking habit which led to him failing to save her in a critical situation and she died. Patrick hit rock bottom after that and Jack, who always had a crush on Patrick's wife, blames him for her death ever since. He took his daughter to take care of her because Patrick was just a complete failure. And that's where the movie starts.So far, so good. Makes for a great drama constellation but the problem is those pieces of information are only given to us as short flashback revelations whereas THIS should have been part of the main plot through the first half of the second act! It would have made a much better first half, especially in that apocalyptic and isolated environment.But after a tight and well paced opener it starts to drag pretty fast, with way to much running time spent on false father Jack and the girl and that the two men just hate each other with the audience wondering why and how that situation came about. Character-driven narration doesn't need twists and turns that are set up like in a mystery or whodunnit movie. So why not give that part of the story more room?The ending was pretty dissatisfying to me because they just killed off the wrong guy. At first, Jack seems to be a doer and overall stronger person than Patrick. Later we see him struggling with fatherhood, he doesn't want to leave the "safe haven", hell, he's even close to shooting his not-daughter and himself in a moment of desperation! Patrick on the other hand starts off as weak, then destroyed, and then even mentally disturbed. But he manages to climb out of his hole, stops drinking and becomes the doer in the end. That part of the writing is actually pretty compelling with their inversed character arcs, but then Patrick kills himself to rescue them and Jack who even tried to kill himself and the girl gets away looking into the sunset with his new family!Family? Oh yes, by the way, another woman who is also pregnant suddenly joins them close to the third act. I feel like she was written only for the last shot where the new "family" looks into the sun just to give the theme of false parenthood a visual. But from a story structure perspective her character was absolutely unnecessary. So the underlying message seems to be: A weak father with two children which aren't his own now takes care of that patchwork family without the children even knowing who their real fathers are. Was that intentional? I think the better ending would have been Jack, having become the weaker person over time, should have found redemption in sacrificing himself for the others, while Patrick, having found his strength, takes his rightful place as his daughter's father and saves her. That way it would have been a lot more satisfying. Okay, maybe a bit too formulaic and maybe the writers tried to really push for something unexpected but in this case it just didn't work out for me. It just felt wrong, especially since they never even tell the girl that Jack isn't her father. Ever!Too bad I have to sound so negative, I actually quite enjoyed this film. I really appreciate what the producers were going for and I definitely recommend watching it, just prepare to be a little disappointed in the end.

This movie was made in Hungary. --Shortly into the movie a horse is shot dead, it looks very real. There is nothing in the credits that says no animals were brought to harm, so once again we have a movie made in a country outside the USA in which animals were killed to save special effects money. I don't like seeing this kind of thing, I guess a lot of people do. --There isn't much more for me to say about this movie, I was disappointed that syfy would promote this, but I guess I'm maybe one in a thousand that even cares about stuff like this --Anyone reading this will probably think, dude, what are you watching zombies movies for if this bothers you. The answer is, the horse has absolutely no say in its situation, its a helpless defenseless creature. A movie company may as well put a large predator into a holding pen with a horse that has no way to move or defend itself, and film the slaughter, slapping one another on the back about a job well done. --Thanks for reading

I'm surprised that I went to the trouble of registering and then writing a review for THIS movie. First time movie review for me. I saw a preview of Extinction on another movie I watched at home and it looked intriguing. Despite all the free streaming I get, I even paid $3 to watch this. Happy to say I was not disappointed, in fact, I was impressed. This is a solid piece of movie making. Cinematography was evocative and effective, creating a powerful framework for the story...and even played with some of the themes of the movie; there were a few scenes when the blues of winter almost looked like greens and I questioned what I was looking at...is that grass? Or snow? Hope or no hope?Acting was solid. I like both of these actors. I was introduced to Jeffrey Donovan recently on the 2nd season of Fargo and I get it now, he is good. Mathew Fox is convincing. The girl also is a fresh new face.Zombies, and I'm a bit of an expert here, are sufficiently terrifying because they are fast enough and slow enough to scare you (World War Z...too fast and as a result not much of a connection. Walking Dead, too damn slow). Don't want to expound on this too much as it would spoil it.But the real treat for me was the story and ensuing questions that inevitably accompany such a plot. It's one of the reasons I loved Walking Dead 1st season so much. In the face of such adversity, what would I do? Again, no spoilers, but I found myself wondering what I would have done and any time a movie can get me to talk to myself, I know it's doing something right. Lastly, the more important plot within a plot, the relationship, was cleverly peeled back a little at a time. Not too little to annoy me, but enough to intrigue me. This is what sets this apart from other 'zombie' movies. It's really less about them and more about the 'remains of the day' that make this a winner in my book.I believe this movie was never released in theaters, too bad, but glad I found it.