in the lower end quality spectrum of the genre

one thing that i like about this "grenre", meaning "confined space, involving some kind of potentially deadly game", is the fact that you don't neccessarily need a huge budget for a film to succed, but rather a good idea and some good writing.

spoilers.

with this one, we have a great basic idea. in fact the first 10 minutes of the film are brilliant. unfortunately it seems like the writer(s) ran out of ideas at that point. instead of implementing some kind of "solvable" puzzle, like cube, exam, fermats room ..etc, it becomes clear that there is nothing to colve here and that it will implement the "one person standing" concept instead and turn it into a pretend social experiment a la belko experiment, the employer, breething room ..etc, which makes it terribly predictable. in fact one could easily spare all the runtime up to the final 5 minutes, as it goes the most boring route: people will plot and manipulate against certain characters, until the final "surprise ending".

these kinds of outcome usually does one of two things: 1. make up for the lost time, like house of 9 for example, which was terrible until the end, but made up for it or 2. like 90% of the genre does, makes you feel like you wasted 90 minutes completely.

this is a perfect example of the second kind. there was nothing clever, nothing surprising, it just renders the whole affair utterly senseless.

but even within all the "filler minutes" in the middle, there were some annoying flaws. right at the very beginning, where the majority decided that the old people had to go first, wtf was that? out of a group of 50 people the majority gets themselves convinced to such a dumb idea that leads to straight up murder, within minutes? i understand that the majority of people are stupid sheep, but that waaaayy to easy. also, the film could have done without all the cliches about cops and soldiers. and of course there had to be racists in the group, that wanted the black guy and the hispanic out. how convenient.

furthermore, if you do such a film, you have to keep people guessing. why the hell reveal that it was aliens, right in the middle of it?

i gave it 2/10 for the basic idea, but the rest was unbearable.