When i heard there was a sci-fi / war film with a budget of $70 million dollars and had extremely realistic CGI i was really excited to see this movie. It started out strong, had great direction and what appeared to be quite solid actors even from the start - aaaaaaannnd it all fell apart in the first 20 minutes or so.
The USA military is involved in a war in Moldova (yes, that's a real place) and we begin the film with a soldier that is disobeying orders as he can not wait for backup and goes after an objective on his own - we are not told what the objective is but as it turns out it is not important because when he arrives at the location the enemy are all dead. Because it is dark he is using some sort of night vision tech and through the lenses he sees some sort of anomaly.
For us in the audience, this is obviously a ghost, but then again, we saw the movie poster and preview and are already aware of the overall premise. The soldier doesn't know what to do and being a soldier and all, shoots bullets at it. This obviously has no effect and when the ghost charges him it makes impact and kills him instantly.
It's all still quite creepy and interesting at this point but after about a quarter of an hour or so, the entire military is made aware of the fact that this is not a traditional enemy and that bullets and what not don't do anything to the enemy.
So what is the logical next step in your opinion? Go back in with more soldiers armed in exactly the same capacity to take out these ghosts even though it has been well-established to not just us the viewers, but the people in the film that this tactic definitely will not work... but that is precisely what they do.
source
maybe bring a tank... because little tiny bullets didn't work, how about really big bullets?
This goes on an on, always ending in the same result with the military getting insta-killed by ghost enemies that bullets and explosions have absolutely no effect on. This doesn't stop them from continuing to fire bullets for the next hour or so in vain as they watch everyone get ghost killed all around them.
It isn't until a professor comes along with some new technology that can help them actually be able to do some harm to this enemy that the strategy changes at all - so of course the commanders and the soldiers think this guy is an idiot and getting in the way because he doesn't know what he is talking about. Obviously if you just shoot more bullets at the ghosts, that'll get em.
source
get your stupid light machine out of here professor! We got this! we have grenades now!
It's just so frustrating to watch even though the CGI is absolutely fantastic. It is so beyond the realm of what any sane or rational person would do in this scenario that it is quite infuriating to watch.
trailer the official Netflix channel
If that trailer doesn't get under you skin enough I can assure you the actual film will. I sometimes enjoy big-budget films with nonsensical violence but when the highly-trained people depicted in the film don't have the same sort of reactionary capabilities that a 6-year old would, I can only roll my eyes so much before I gotta question who greenlighted this script.
It should come as no surprise that this movie never went to theaters and was released straight-to-Netflix. I don't think this is as bad as "straight to DVD" because there are many great Netflix originals. We will never know how much money this movie lost since Netflix is very secretive about their internal financials, but i would be willing to bet that it is a lot.
I would suggest that you watch about a half hour of this movie only to confirm that I am not making this gripe up, but I believe you will agree really quickly that it simply becomes too unfathomably dumb from that point forward.