Arcadian Review: This gory sci-fi horror flick needs more Nic Cage

There are two wolves in each of us. That goes for everyone except Nicolas Cage. Inside Nicolas Cage, there are two Nicolas Cages: the dark, reserved Nick Cage of the a pig and Leaving Las Vegasand the screaming, manic Nic Cage on The Vampire’s Kiss, The Wicker Manand Mom and dad. Who wins? Who decided he was right for a role, sometimes regardless of the film around him. (I’ll never stop wondering why a calm, introspective, straightforward Nicolas Cage turned up for an otherwise incredible supernatural action film I drive Angry.)

In Benjamin Brewer’s little alien apocalypse movie Arcadian, the quiet grown-up Nic Cage reappears for a film that could use a little more energy. But for once the central question of the film is not who Nic Cage has come to set, but how much he has to come to the set. “Nicolas Cage tries to raise teenagers at the end of the world” has potential as a premise, even if it doesn’t sound radically innovative. Arcadian Too often, though, he sidesteps Cage and finds nothing nearly as appealing or energetic to replace him with.

At the beginning of the film, Cage’s character, Paul, is on the run from a city that is falling apart from an attack by unseen forces. The crisis is suggested mostly with beeps and striking images of abandoned streets and a smoking skyline. The approach assumes a project of the order of Skyline — a low-budget but high-concept disaster movie with an ambitious visual design that elevates it above its small-scale origins. Immediately afterwards, however, Paul retreats to the countryside, where he discovers several twin babies lying on a small mattress in a space full of rubbish. The series is so abbreviated that it feels like Brewer and screenwriter Michael Nealon are deliberately withholding details for a later big reveal that never comes.

It’s unclear where Paul is when he finds the babies, how he determines their guardians are missing, or if he has any connection to any of the children or where he finds them. It’s easiest to guess that he came across both by accident and that the babies were hidden by parents who then died in the attack. But it’s shot and edited in such a confusing way that you could just as easily assume that Paul came upon a farm and killed the owners to take their land, then was mortified to discover they had children. Or that he was returning to his family home and was shocked to learn that someone had cached babies on his property. It’s the first time Arcadian it slightly skips over what seems like important world-building and character context, but it’s far from the latter. (Notably, we never learn anything about Paul—who he is or where he comes from.)

Fifteen years after the opening scene, Paul begins living on a farm with the now half-grown boys, Joseph (Jaden Martel, from It movies and Out of the knives) and Thomas (Maxwell Jenkins, from Netflix’s Lost in space). Paul is a stern but frustratingly distant father figure who seems to be reaching the limits of his authority for the first time, while Thomas neglects his duties to escape to a neighboring farm where he pursues a hesitant flirtation with local farm girl Charlotte (Salt burnof Sadie Overall). Meanwhile, Joseph has become a tinkerer with dreams of fighting the invaders with hand-crafted technology—a dream that is urgently realized when the enemy makes an aggressive push to demolish the farm.

Large part of the Arcadian plays like a combination of Bill Paxton’s excellent thriller weakness and newer A quiet place, with the caveat that the mysterious invaders aren’t offended by the noise — they just seem to be offended by humanity in general. A brief line of dialogue floats a theory that the invaders have been sent to clean up Earth’s environment by radically reducing the human population, but it’s clear that this is just speculation by survivors looking for meaning in their situation – one of Arcadianis a better, more subtle nod to how people deal with helplessness and trauma. For the most part, the attackers are alien and terrifyingly unknowable.

They’re also the strongest asset for a film that falls back on familiar tropes and continues to ignore chances to make its story more distinctive. As Thomas’s rebellion becomes increasingly dangerous for both him and his small family, this looks like a chance for great interpersonal tension. Paul and Joseph respond by withdrawing from the conflict, leaving large pieces of the Arcadian curiously relaxed. The film has one remarkably sweet scene between Charlotte and Thomas as they tentatively invent a flirtation in a world where they lack media input or role models to emulate. But Thomas’ relationship with the other two main characters never comes into focus. And without enough human drama to sustain it, Arcadian instead it must return to the human versus non-human conflict.

There are some standout moments in this fight – a mesmerizing, almost silent long shot guaranteed to have audiences screaming in theaters. Too much of Arcadianmonster chasing and home invasion action is familiar from such recent feature films about creatures, from A quiet place and its sequel to Bird box and its sequel to No one will save you. But the creature’s design is unsettling, unsettling and unpredictable. Viewers who don’t remember anything else about this movie a week after seeing it will surely remember the sinister way its antagonists travel, or how they signal they’re ready to attack. Their appearance alone makes the film worth watching for horror fans.

Once the action really gets going, however, Cage is largely absent, and the muddy spatial relationships and confusing, hard-to-watch action take away a significant percentage of the power of what should be an explosive final act. And once the film settles in as a fairly standard chase-and-fight movie, the lack of more character depth or nuance, or more compelling relationships between the main characters, limits what the filmmakers can do to make this story stands out from all past projects echoes. Arcadian does a few things remarkably well for a sci-fi/horror film, but it needed a lot more to really spark: more commitment to the vaguely realized setting, more energy between the two very different brothers at its center, and above all, more Nicholas Cage – any version of him.

Arcadian premieres in theaters on April 12.