Written by Evan Purcell, September 6, 2016, at 5:51 a.m.
Every week, we’ll take a look at another mockbuster from the company that brought you Snakes on a Train, Transmorphers, and Sunday School Musical. This week, we shoot straight into the future with Age of Tomorrow.
Age of Tomorrow Mockbuster
Title: Age of Tomorrow
Sister Film: Edge of Tomorrow
Release Date: June 10, 2014 (four days after the original)
Actors of Note: Robert Picardo (Joe Dante’s BFF and “The Doctor” from Star Trek), Kelly Hu
A Quick Word on The Original
Edge of Tomorrow is a surprisingly good time loop movie starring Tom Cruise and Emily Blunt. The action is fast. The premise is understandable without being stupid. It’s the kind of rare Hollywood scifi explode-a-thon where everything works. It wasn’t, unfortunately, a particularly popular movie. It came out the same year as Captain America: Winter Soldier, Hunger Games: Mockingjay, and Transformers: Age of Extinction, all of which dwarfed it at the box office. (The relative failure of a movie like this is precisely why studios keep churning out sequel after sequel. We only have ourselves to blame.)
The Plot
When you go see a movie after watching the trailer, you pretty much know everything that’s going to happen. If there’s a new Iron Man movie, for example, you can more or less picture the basic rhythms of the plot, teaser to tag. Sure, there will be surprises along the way, but the overall flow of the movie is pretty predictable.
One thing you can say about mockbusters is that they don’t always operate in the most obvious rhythms. A lot of the time, they do. Some feel so familiar in their story structure, you would swear that you’ve seen this exact movie several times before (Apocalypse Pompeii, of example). Other times, the story telling is so lumpy, that you don’t know what to expect. The movie doesn’t know where it’s going, so how could you? A good example of this second type is Almighty Thor, with a plot so strange that you feel like you’re watching a different movie every ten minutes.
I much prefer the latter type of film. Even though they might be objectively worse, they’re surprising and different. With Age of Tomorrow (a mockbuster version of an idiosyncratic blockbuster), I was hoping for a delightfully loopy movie. I was hoping for the kind of 10-movies-all-smashed-together Frankenstein hybrid that only The Asylum could deliver.
I was not let down. Sure, this movie is derivative, but it’s derivative of so many different things at different times that it feels like a whole new beast. What starts as Armageddon quickly morphs into Independence Day before pivoting straight into Aliens territory, never pausing long enough for anything to register. The cumulative effect is numbing and difficult, like trying to get a student with ADHD to finish his math homework before his mind starts to drift again.
If you want to hear the whole plot, it’s best to describe it using a series of short exclamatory sentences:
Look! There’s an asteroid!
No! It’s actually a carrier for spaceships!
Let’s fight the aliens!
Look! A portal to their home base!
Let’s go inside!
Oh no! We made a mistake!
Hey! We’re winning!
We’ll that was easy. Let’s party!
How Can You Tell It’s a Mockbuster?
The plotting alone pushes it into mockbuster territory. With the major studios, even a completely new property like Edge has to follow the basic rules of screenwriting. Sure, it messes with time and causality and all these heavy themes, but it functions with a basic three-act structure. That’s part of what makes it so satisfying to watch. Age, on the other hand, does none of those things. It’s kind of a mess, but it’s fun. If that’s not the dictionary definition of a mockbuster, I don’t know what is.
Overall thoughts:
As far as alien-themed mockbusters go, this is pretty run-of-the-mill. Kelly Hu is completely at home with this kind of material, and the always reliable Robert Picardo is great, as always. The effects are solid and the action is at least easy to watch. There isn’t much to recommend it over slightly better films, like Independents’ Day or the second War of the Worlds. That said, its near-lack of story structure makes it interesting from a filmmaking point of view. And it moves by briskly.
In the end, though, I assume that my memories of this movie are going to drift into space after a few more days. If a movie doesn’t pause long enough to focus on any specific moment, then every moment ends up meaningless.
***
Evan Purcell is the headmaster of a tiny private school in Zanzibar. In addition to writing mildly condescending reviews of bad films, he also writes everything from romance novels to horror stories. Check out his blog and Amazon author page. And in the meantime, shoot them lasers!