Captive State movie review & film summary (2019)

Wyatt and Erica Beeney's screenplay begins with an immediate and hasty explanation of the alien invasion, with a sequence in which younger versions of two of the movie's protagonists witness the bloody deaths of their parents (instantly exploded into red mist by an alien blaster), followed by an audio montage of news reports. The governments of the world surrender quickly after first, violent contact with the aliens, who fly around in boulder-like ships and whose droopy hair turns into jagged quills.

A series of text messages from an old computer fill in the rest. The aliens have become the world's legislature. Certain parts of major cities have been closed off into "closed zones" (such a clever name, that), so that humans can work in great, underground tunnels to harvest the planet's natural resources. Some of the alien leadership lives and operates down there, too, it seems, otherwise the movie's conclusion is even more anticlimactic than it is.

There's a lot of information thrown at us in the movie's opening minutes, so hopefully, it's forgivable if some of the specifics of this synopsis are slightly incorrect. It's not as if the movie itself cares much about the specifics of its story. After the onslaught of exposition during and just after the opening credits, the screenplay intentionally leaves us grasping for whatever details we can gather from the mysterious and late-explained actions of vaguely defined characters with shrouded motives.

This is really to say that, while the movie does eventually provide the basic semblance of a plot, it's a long time coming. In that meantime, there's little reason to care about the movie's characters, its world, or its low-key interpretation of a familiar science-fiction tale.

Nine years after the invasion, parts of the city of Chicago have become a closed zone. On the city's Lower West Side, Gabriel (Ashton Sanders) works in a data-collection facility, where the content of memory cards and hard drives is uploaded to an alien server (apparently, for research, although it's mostly for the purposes of showing convenient back story to explain the movie's final twists—if one can call the withholding of basic character information "a twist").

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