The Area 51 Incident (2022) Review

The Area 51 Incident (2022) Review

Area 51 harbors a dark secret; A wormhole strengthening over the last 50 years. Alien creatures escape and over-run the facility, the survivors take refuge in a nuclear bunker, but before long the alien invaders have made their way inside. Can the survivors outlast the creatures until the Military arrives?

Director Rhys Frake-Waterfield is a name to watch. In my recent batch of forthcoming film releases, I received two movie titles where Mr Frake-Waterfield called the shots – THE KILLING TREE and this. And whilst both movies suffer slightly from a saggy midsection, they both more than compensate for such shortcomings elsewhere.

As with his THE KILLING TREE, Frake-Waterfield manages to pull off a big budget concept on a lower budget and still make it work. It initially looks and feels like it’s going be a STARSHIP TROOPERS wannabe, with Seventies DOCTOR WHO production values, before shifting gear from larger scale to the more intimate as our key characters hole-up in a bunker away from the alien invasion.

It’s to the film’s credit that I persisted with the viewing – the screener link provided was for playing on Vimeo, and boy, did Vimeo glitch and buffer, like every half-a-minute – and I am pleased that I did, yet again the director proves that he has a knack for delivering the goods, regardless of the genre and the budget afforded to him. There’s something about his assured filmmaking and style that marks him out as a name to watch.

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