Spectral (2016)

Sadly Over-hyped

If you don't like this, we can't be friends.

The first must-see film of the year.

It is an exhilarating, distressing, funny and profound film, with one of the more memorable film scores in years,

What starts as your any other action movie, ends with hard-core sci-fi. Nice cast, with good direction and very nice visual effects.

Spectral: Special Forces along with a DARPA scientist and a CIA agent battle invisible creatures which can kill by touch and seem to be composed of energy. Through special goggles they appear as ghost-like wraiths.Set in near future Moldova where the US has intervened in a Civil War. (The supporters of the over-thrown Government are referred to as Insurgents.) A devastated City and abandoned/ruined industrial plants give both the feel of Terminator and Alien. The Special Ops teams are equipped like Colonial Marines or even Starship Troopers. A Netflix original filmed in and around Budapest, I recognised some landmarks but I hope CGI was used to inflict the damage Good SF/Horror which at 1h 44m might have benefited from a 15m cut in running time. 7/10.

Clyne (James Badge Dale) works for a defense contractor that manufactures a bunch of stuff including hyper spectral goggles. The US has a Delta force embedded in a civil unrest in Moldavia. During the fighting, their goggles are picking up deadly spectral looking things which is recorded. Clyne, as the expert, is flown to the war zone to investigate. This is a made for Netflix production. Emily Mortimer plays a CIA operative and Bruce Greenwood is his usual general role. As the battle against the "ghosts" becomes seemingly futile, the formula has Clyne figure out what they are at an hour 14 minutes into the film and allows a predictable and interesting ending. Guide: No swearing, sex, or nudity.

I liked this movie as it is well made has cool effects and a decent story line. I would only point out, being and knowing a lot of engineers, that lots of the "workarounds" and quick solutions and gadget reworkings shown in the movie are, to me, too far from reality to consider even in a science fiction context. Sometimes it reminds me of a movie where a printed circuit board that was to control the fire sequence of a magnetic cannon pas split broken in 2 pieces (like a PC motherboard cracked in 2) and the person in the movie held it together by hand and then the cannon could be fired thus saving the crew of the (space) ship involved. And the theories and science support for the revelations of the movie are really hard to accept. But anyway most movies have similar "solutions"; I really liked the movie.