2025 ARMAGEDDON (2022)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *adventure*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

Ding, ding, ding, we have a new winner for worst film-- or, maybe just "worst SF film," since the previous award-holder, KOMODO VS COBRA, belonged to that category-- and KOMODO at least offered nice Hawaiian location shots.

Most films from The Asylum are at least forthright about what ideas they're swiping. But for 2025, the writers ripped off 2015's PIXELS, which was about some really dumb aliens mistaking video-game broadcasts for an interstellar attack. This time, the dumb aliens somehow get tuned into only one category of streaming broadcasts, those from The Asylum backlist. The 2025 aliens react the same way as those of PIXELS, by making duplicates of the "weapons" and unleashing them on Earth. However, just to show that the 2025 writers couldn't even steal well, toward the movie's end they throw in some cockamamie claim about the ETs wanting to breed with humans once they overthrow the planet.

Other Asylum films also sometimes toss in three or four familiar-face performers for spice, but 2025 contents itself with Michael Pare as President of our beleaguered world. He's not the star, though: that position is shared by two adult sisters who end up figuring out what the aliens are doing based on their (ha ha) enduring love for Asylum movies.

Once again, it's hard to judge if the two young leads have any acting ability, because both the script and direction work against them constantly. Lindsey Wilson is a scientist and Jhey Castles is a Navy lieutenant, and we're constantly told that at some point the two women became estranged-- but the genius writers couldn't even be bothered to specify what their quarrel was.

So when the viewer isn't being bored with pedestrian dramatics, he has to look sharp to catch sight of the various doppelgangers of Asylum critters like Megashark, Crocosaurus and the Transmorphers, because most of them are barely on screen for two minutes. As with PIXELS, all of these mock-ups of mockbuster monsters don't count as crossovers, because they're not even close to being the real thing. The film just barely edges into the combative mode in that the Castles character commandeers a giant robot and fights some sort of amalgam-monster toward the end.

Since PIXELS wasn't any sort of brilliant notion, there's no reason the Asylum hacks couldn't have had some fun with the absurd concept. But the writers' idea of humor comes down to name-checking such Asylum obscurities as BACHELOR PARTY (not the one with Tom Hanks) and AQUARIUM OF THE DEAD.