Inspirations are good, but if the enthusiastic urge to overplay on it does not get curbed, it runs the danger of becoming a cheap knockoff.  Assassinaut is, sadly, such a film. You can see that it wants to become a good science fiction film. That desire shows, so clearly that it becomes the film’s pitfall.

The plot of the film is not novel, but there were scopes to elevate that. It had dystopia, it had space travel and it had aliens. It is mostly a mash-up of many films we have seen on these tropes, separately or together.  But, the film; and the story that it tries to tell, does not really explore any of those tropes. We were told about the situations, but that’s that. It does not explore any of those in depth, neither does it evoke enough emotion through its central characters to engage the audience or even make the audience take the film seriously.

If the story stops one from taking the film seriously, the dialogue, the characterizations and in conjunction the acting pushed it toward the campy, spoof movie zone. Like the SyFy ones. But, even at that, it does not go all the way to garner the occasional funs one can have watching those films. Characters were templates; the strong leader, the goofy geek who is good at technology, the arrogant one who does not really help but later reflects on their behavior, and the aloof one who might just hide some secret. And if the characters are templates, the dialogues are even more so. It just cemented their nature, so obvious that one might wonder if the film is spoofing itself.

The adventure of the kids in an alien planet becomes meandering with nothing concrete to lift it off. Some decent camerawork and good CGI were completely undermined by all those above-mentioned faults. Add to that, there were some half-baked world view reflections, that made the film look even poorer as it had been struggling to be taken seriously already.

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Even though I wanted to like director Drew Bolduc’s effort, there were frankly too many faults. Assassinaut never really comes across as something that has been put up after putting a lot of thought into it.

★★

‘Assassinaut’ PREMIERED AT THE BOSTON UNDERGROUND FILM FESTIVAL 2019.
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Director/Screenwriter: Drew Bolduc
Stars: Shannon Hutchinson, Vito Trigo, Jasmina Parent
Runtime: 75 minutes
Music: Darius Holbert
Cinematography: Kunitaro Ohi
Editing: Drew Bolduc, Michael Lane