(Spoilers.) Also known as Alien Arrival. We are tempted to say that Arrowhead is actually a good movie, because we did enjoy it. But as a genre and science fiction movie, it simply dishes out too much, so much of the time you're going with the flow more than you are truly understanding what's going on. Personally, we here at a wasted life think that Arrowhead — which utilizes an introductory narrative to establish its world and has three or four different core locations, all of which could offer a narrative of their own — would have worked better as a television series or mini-series than it does as a movie.
Trailer to
Arrowhead:
Truth be told, we subsequently required the plot description at Wikipedia to understand what we had watched, one of the reasons that we initially decided not to review the movie despite basically liking it. But then we realized that Arrowhead was written and directed by Jesse O'Brien, so we revised our decision: we had already skipped reviewing his entertaining but flawed killer-yahoos grotesque Two Heads Creek (2019 / trailer) and felt we would be dissing him if we ignore yet another watchable (if less clear and easy and funny) genre film of his — and as flawed as the two movies of his that we have seen may be, they do reveal a filmmaker of promise.
Based on O'Brien's earlier short film titled Arrowhead: Signal (2012), about which we nothing, this Arrowhead — Alien Arrival is a lousy title because, if you get down to it, the humans are the aliens on the planet (or moon, as the case may be) — is a low-budget movie with a lot of aspirations. It remains watchable and interesting from beginning to end, but has way too much on its plate (both in terms of the narrative and its themes) and thus fails to be completely satisfying. Also, its ending is a bit of a dissatisfying head-scratcher that does more for leaving things open for a possible sequel — for which Alien Arrival would be a good title, if it transpires on Earth — than it does successfully resolve the narrative.
On a world where a war rages between two generals, General Hatch (Mark Redpath of The Cost [2022 / trailer]) and General Lang, we first meet our hero, Kye Cortland (Dan Mohr), in prison, where he proves that while he might not charge blindly he is a manly man not adverse to taking hard measures to solve the problem at hand. Next thing you know, he's got a bionic leg and is off on a mission to retrieve some data from a scientific spaceship deep in space. (The narrative crossover between the ready-to-launch spaceship on the earth to the same spaceship floating in space above the moon saved narrative time and budget money, but it did cause us to burst out in loud guffaws.) Of course something goes wrong and suddenly Kay is stranded on the strange moon (literally: we see him running on the ship and then lying in the dirt on the planet), where he discovers a woman survivor from the ship, Tarren (Aleisha "Intelligent Blonde" Rose of Burns Point [2016 / trailer])...
A lot happens in Arrowhead, so much that it quickly gets hard to follow. For that, the location is marvelous, and looks exactly how one might expect a desert planet to look like, with director/scriptwriter O'Brien always using it to his advantage. The planet looks and feels inhospitable and hard, much like the prison and fight scenes in general are gritty and violent. O'Brien also gets solid performances from his actors, although Christopher Kirby (of Daybreakers [2009], the always rewatchable Iron Sky [2012 / trailer below], Upgrade [2018 / trailer], and Blood Vessel [2019 / trailer]) is a bit wasted in a relatively thankless role of Norman Oleander, another "survivor".
Christopher Kirby in
Iron Sky (the trailer):
Considering how low the budget was, the props required of the science fiction narrative — the ship, shuttle, safety pods, prison mouthpieces, R2D2 RE3F the computer (with the voice of Shaun Micallef of Bad Eggs [2003 / trailer]), aliens, etc — are amazingly convincing. RE3F might be used a bit too often for easy laughs, but manages, despite being a computer, to establish itself as an actual character, one that by the end of the movie seems to have developed some sort of freedom of thought — something that works more than it seems narratively convenient.
There are more than a few shocking turns in the story, and the narrative doesn't always fill all its holes, particularly in regard to Tarren, who in theory must have experienced the same thing as Norman and Kye but never has any indication of it. The ending is also slightly questionable, in that both Kye and Tarren, the good guys of the story, basically don't care or think twice about introducing an alien being to their own world. For that matter, considering the reason of Kye's continual regeneration and disappearing spells, the question does arise of whether he is even able to survive off the moon.
Speaking of Kye, or, to be exact, of Dan Mohr, the actor playing him: director Jesse O'Brien reveals and unleashes his inner Bob Mizer (27 Mar 1922 — 12 May 1992) often in Arrowhead in that he regularly has his exceptionally well-built and enticingly lithe actor go shirtless and sweaty and dirt-smeared. (To say that Mohr looks droolably hot shirtless and sweaty and dirt-smeared is an understatement.) It is a bit of a shame that O'Brien didn't require Tarren (or, rather, Aleisha Rose), to do likewise, but Mohr's six-pack and sinuous muscularity makes it easy enough to forget about what the attractive blonde never shows.
Arrowhead is an action heavy and violent movie that has no problems keeping its audience interested despite all its imperfections, many of which might have been solved had the screenplay been streamlined. The movie evidences true creativity and commitment, and everyone involved does an excellent job. The low budget is occasionally noticeable, but for the most part everything looks great. If you don't understand everything that happens, don't sweat it but look up the film description on Wikipedia: once you read it, more or less everything becomes clear and the movie comprehensible.
Still, and again, we cannot help but think that considering everything that the story of Arrowhead tries to cover during its 99-minute running time, the movie should have been at least a mini-series.
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