My wife and I watched this feckless, rambling video game/movie on Thanksgiving Day. We’re in scenic Da Nang, Vietnam, and we reasoned that a corny science fiction movie would be the taste of home we didn’t especially need. We were right. A plot summary-

A handful of oily, greasy dipshit kids have a space ship and they discover some corporate treasure drifting past the shit hole planet they live on. With the help of a glitchy robot (the only actor who can act in the entire ensemble) they break in and make mistake after mistake until they die. The lone survivor poops herself out of the wreckage in case the box office numbers are high enough for a sequel.

The science fiction field is brimming with talent right now, more so than ever. And yet this was not written by any of them. Not one could be coaxed into writing a screenplay on spec, not one of them had the steely fortitude to endure endless rounds of zoom calls, dunce cap meetings, dead ends, and general scheming, and in the end the only writers at the table were politicians. This is why we can’t have nice things.

I’m note sure anyone else has noticed, but we’re in a truly morbid period when it comes to screen entertainment. Madness, isolation, greed, depravity, pettiness, squalor, and as with Alien Romulus, bad writing, have taken the stage. The Golden Age of Smallness is here, and right when we don’t need it. Something good will come of this, I’m sure of it.