PrimeWire

This is a great little movie that has heart. The 1950’s are the Watermelon Jolly Ranchers of American pop culture. The exaggerated fake version has come to seem more real than the authentic flavor. It’s become a big soulless bag of memes. When a movie tries too hard to recreate the 1950’s the 1950’s era ends up becoming a character in the movie playing the role of the 1950’s era. It distracts me from paying attention to the characters into thinking about how I feel about period authenticity. Happily that doesn’t happen in this movie and it just couldn’t happen because the two main characters are forces of nature. They are so good it’s impossible to focus on anything other than them and their quirky energy. The other bag of memes that kills little movies like this contains UFO B movie cliches. I already know this is an alien invasion movie. There will be no plot surprises and one of two endings (the nice one or the sad one) is a foregone conclusion. The only thing I don’t know about an alien invasion movie, is whether I am going to fall asleep while we go from A to B or I will be treated to some great writing and acting which make it a good watch. I expect the meme generator to start chugging plot within three minutes of the opening credits like always. That doesn’t happen here. Nothing happens here, in the first several minutes of the movie, other than a lot of snappy banter. Two very likeable sassy characters having a running nerd conversation. Doing town stuff. The plot nothingness forced me to spend time hanging out in the small world of the movie rather than focusing on my wait for the inevitable machinery to finally start kicking in. It made the world go from unfamiliar to familiar. By the time the inevitable was in full swing I knew the small world well enough to see it go from familiar to unfamiliar through their eyes. Nice.