Modern Monday - Save Yourselves! A Review

 

I'm always excited about independent sci fi films which are reasonably good. They're rare, they're fun, and frequently launch careers. (Someday I hope to do one!) Which is why I was really excited when I heard about an indie film called Save Yourselves! written and directed by Alex Huston Fischer and Elanor Wilson - two names which I suspect we will hear again.

After waiting for many months for the film to be available for streaming, it's finally accessible through Amazon Prime.

**Warning** there are mild spoilers. Discretion is advised.

The film begins in a cutesy sort of way, focusing in on a young couple, Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Paul Reynolds), who are so modern it almost hurts. They're very cute together, but also very hapless. Su cannot do any sort of a project without getting a list from an online magazine. Jack is an unassertive metrosexual. They both admit they have "no skills." After realizing that their lives have gotten into a rut, they decide to back away from their careers for a while. Su's mere suggestion to her boss that she might need a short break leads to her being fired, which sends her into a mild panic. Jack assures her that she'll be fine. They decide to do something drastic and take up a friend's offer to spend a week out in a cabin in the woods. They make a pact to completely unplug - no internet, no phones.

If this were a zombie movie, they would be killed by the third scene. But in this movie, they manage to survive by being in the right place at the wrong time. No sooner do they begin their drive out to the sticks than strange things begin falling to earth from the sky. They leave friends and family lots of messages that they will be unavailable for a while, and then turn off their phones. This leaves them utterly in the dark as to the disaster which begins to befall all the world's major cities.

They enjoy their time together at the cabin, failing at everything from paddling a canoe to chopping wood. Then, the alien invasion which has raged everywhere else finally arrives at their location. The aliens resemble "pouffes," a sort of fuzzy footstool, which is what Su calls them. (Think of it as a sort of oversized tribble.) When they return to the same room later on and find the "pouffe" gone, they find it odd, but think nothing of it.

Later, they find the pouffe again after noticing that all the alcohol in the cabin has disappeared, and bottles have a strange hole bored through them. They realize it has moved on its own, and try approaching it. Then it moves - right in front of them!

Realizing their lives are in danger, they eventually decide to abandon the cabin and make a run for it. This is problematic, since the alcohol-consuming aliens have drunk all the gasoline from their car. Fortunately, the shed out back has a diesel-powered Jeep, and diesel doesn't seem to appeal to the aliens. They drive off with only a go-bag (which they accidentally forget and have to go back for).

This is where the plot turns somewhat sour. The movie bumbles along, as do its inept protagonists, stumbling out of one crisis into another. They rescue a baby, which makes things both more interesting and more awkward. They eventually fall into some sort of alien trap which lifts them up into the stratosphere. The movie concludes with lots of other similar-looking "bubble traps" up in the sky, and Su laughs with delight at having apparently survived. But have they?

The film's klutzy ending leaves viewers unsatisfied. It seems to set up the potential for a sequel (and as of now a television series is in the works), but there are no answers. The motives of the aliens remains a mystery, the nature of the trap that captures Su and Jack is a mystery, and so the plot is literally and figuratively left up in the air. Although Su and Jack are a very cute couple, they are not ideal main characters and it becomes difficult to endure just how helpless they are. The pouffes are cute, but we learn very little about them, and that is also unfulfilling.

The movie does have something going for it - it's radically different. Different protagonists, different plot, different ending - and this is done in a way which may leave the viewer puzzled and dissatisfied, yet somehow not concluding that the movie sucked. That's quite an accomplishment, especially from an indie sci fi film.

Rottentomatoes.com gave this movie an 89% approval rating - which isn't surprising since professional movie reviewers give absurdly high approvals to anything which isn't the same old crap (remember the absurdly high reviews that were given to Being John Malkovich, in spite of the horrifyingly bad ending?). But the audience score is only a 60% approval rating - barely avoiding the "spilled popcorn" rating status. This is the exact opposite of what usually happens with sci fi films, where audiences universally approve far more than the reviewers do. Professional reviewers might have found the movie refreshing, but audiences rated it low by science fiction standards.

This is a good movie for the cell-phone-generation. It's also a good representation of how modern life has really eviscerated our overall survival skills. The film had the bad luck to be released during a pandemic - so going to see it in the theaters was out - but that same pandemic gave the film a boost, as people related to a disaster brought about by an invasion.

All in all, I have to give Save Yourselves! only three and a half out of five stars. It had great potential, but then blew it. It's new and interesting, and the "cute factor" saves it, but the bad ending was not worthy of the great set-up.

Maybe the TV series will be better.

Eric

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