Captive State Movie Review

Captive State (2019)

Rent Captive State on Amazon Video
Written by: Erica Beeney, Rupert Wyatt
Directed by: Rupert Wyatt
Starring: John Goodman, Ashton Sanders, Jonathan Majors, Vera Farmiga, Alan Ruck, Madeline Brewer, Colson Baker
Rated: PG-13
Watch the trailer

Plot
After ten years of extraterrestrial occupation, residents of Chicago must decide whether to continue to live under alien rule or support the resistance.

Verdict
It's not bad, it's just shallow and unfocused. The movie never grabs you, making you wonder how you'd react under alien rule. It never asks any big questions either. It's more or less an action movie, and while the main characters are terrorists for which we're rooting, the movie doesn't capitalize on that reversal either.
Skip it.

Review
This starts in media res during what we later realize is an alien invasion. A decade later and aliens run the world. We don't see much of the aliens which helps. Less is usually more as aliens can quickly look more cartoon than realistic.

A cop (John Goodman) is chasing the resistance despite all evidence pointing to them having been eradicated.
Humans work under alien rule. All data is processed and uploaded to aliens. It's a dystopia with a repressive regime. I like the premise though I have a lot of questions. How do the aliens communicate? What do they do with this data? Is it busy work or some sort of catalog?
While we later learn there are human translators, that's a very simple explanation when Arrival's entire plot is just about communication.

Captive State does not do a great job of relaying what it's like to live in this world. How would a decade of oppression change things? The movie has a few things happening, but where is it going? There should be more to this grim world where everyone is surveiled.

 

This gets intense towards the end. The resistance survived and are planning an explosion to topple the aliens. It's terrorism, but we're rooting for the terrorists because they are the resistance that want to restore the world we know. I like that this twists an attack into something good, well possibly.
Is Chicago the aliens home base? I'd think they have multiple aliens sites, so what good does destroying one base do?

The ending is a bit of a fake out. It just feels hollow as it connects all the pieces. Did the attack succeed or fail? That's a bit ambiguous at first but we finally get all the answers. Unfortunately it's not that satisfying.

This is adjacent in theme to Arrival (read my review), taking place years later after alien contact, but it lacks the depth of plot and characters. Arrival's entire plot focuses on how to communicate with aliens, where Captive State glosses over that and jumps into defeating aliens that are clearly superior. It's an underdog plight that I don't quite believe.