Captive State

Chaos descends as aliens invade and overwhelm Earth's defences.

Possessing unassailable strength and intergalactically advanced technology, the planet succumbs to their rule, and must dismally embrace monstrous will.

Only a scant few escape extreme poverty, and they're self-destructively tasked with brainstorming their own ruin.

The aliens seek to extract everything the Earth has to offer, every last microbe they can voraciously steal, and what happens to its inhabitants in the meantime, is indeed of little concern.

In the opening moments, a family seeks escape, but is cut down immediately after breaking through local improvised defences.

Captive State unreels years later, the children having grown up meanwhile, each day a struggle to survive, every moment despairing combat.

The police manage relations between organic and extraterrestrial life and find themselves in a miserable position.

But William Mulligan (John Goodman) does his best to look out for troubled Gabriel (Ashton Sanders), whose father was once his partner, before everything drastically changed.

The result is first rate sci-fi, with an ending that brought me to tears.

How do you make cutting edge realistic science-fiction that doesn't heavily rely on special effects?

You contact Rupert Wyatt and his crew after synthesizing Captive State's distillations.

There are no moments in its present where you feel at ease, where there's a break from the rotting tension.

And without the visual effects, the aesthetic acrimony, knowledge of interstellar hubris, a focus on messianic maestros, the film tills biodiverse grassroots, and produces authentic desperation.

Not without hope.

Nothing utopian or grotesque or supernatural, just hope that the aliens can be defeated, or at least held in check or at bay.

Strictly confined.

It's unclear what happens in the end.

Even without the special effects, the budget's bigger than a lot of independent sci-fi, but the money was well spent on realistic settings, which augment the film's resourceless ambience.

The ending's brilliant and heartbreaking, a masterstroke of revelatory storytelling.

Takes Cloverfield up a notch.

A couple of notches.

A bunch of notches.

With Vera Farmiga (Jane Doe).

And Mr. Alan Ruck (Charles Rittenhouse).