Sol Invictus (2021)

I had not heard of this movie. It is a cheaply made galactic version of "Lord of the Flies." That said, it stands reasonable well on its own. A group of boys find themselves on a planet during a competition among some space cadets. They are somehow dropped into a milieu that is not what they expected. One group is connected and the rest are singles who must prove themselves to the rest. There is a dangerous creature or creatures on the planet, but the real threat is within the group. They are caught between their competitive beings and their wish to escape their prison. The thing reeks of distrust and immaturity (which means that it does hit the mark pretty well). They are incredibly dangerous individuals and babies at the same time. They are selfish and simple, but they are also filed with angst and complexities. My biggest criticism is that we are never able to figure out what the hell they are doing there and what they are trying to accomplish when it comes to getting home. A clear picture of that would have taken it beyond an encounter among a diverse group of flawed figures. Also, I would have liked to know what life on Earth was like at this time.

I was utterly surprised at how poorly this movie was reviewed by some people.Bottom line, this movie had me in its grips from almost the beginning.While perhaps there were a few forced moments in the plot, I really didn't know what was going to happen, and yes, I cared about the characters.I watched this with my 9-year-old son and we both like it.For me there was an appropriate amount of mystery, and I even liked the spareness of the setting, the dialog and the plot.This movie is not about space. It's about PEOPLE.

The acting is not so good and there is a high degree of inconsistency and flip flopping in the characters and story. Real people and situations are not that inconsistent and so all these characters seem really fake. Also hard to relate to is how almost all these characters have not an ounce of sympathy. Ira drops dead with no response at all from anyone as if it had not even happened, off they march to "win fame and glory" in a contest without a comment on the death. Then we hear about how there is only one team to compete with not 11; all the rest are dead ha ha ha they laugh about how it will be easier to win now. These are some of the most (unbelievably) unsympathetic characters I have seen depicted. Its not one group lacking compassion for another, something real humans do often enough. Its everyone lacking compassion for everyone most of the time. It kept me from ever developing a care as to what happened to them. In fact I just was hoping most of them would be killed off soon so I did not have to experience their foul presence anymore. This movie interests me in just one regard which is the frightening prospect that real people in the real world could actually relate to these jerks without despising them. I did not think it was made consistently clear that the audience is expected to despise them. If that was intended I did not get the message. So I wonder did the marketing research figure there are real people out there who might draw inspiration from some of these psychopaths? That prospect scares me more than any scene in this lousy movie did. Lord of the Flies (1963) shows human being kids forming clans and acting like human kids would without adult authority controlling them anymore. It is believable and almost completely unlike this movie in that regard and others. Flip flops and inconsistencies. Just a few examples: 1) Help, threat, help, threat: Threats, scheming against each other, not a care what happens to anyone else, then next scene rushing to help one another, then threats again constantly back and forth. For me this flip flopping was NOT done in such a way that it conveyed something meaningful and was not macho kidding around. The threats and scheming were depicted very seriously such that efforts to help each other then seemed a sudden flip flop and unnatural. I think the movie 'Into the White' did this threat/help thing well as a progression. SOL did not.2) Teams win, individuals win: One moment it is all about the teams competing to win as a team, and the next moment it is all about how only one person wins and joins Hyperion. For instance Adrian (himself) won last year before being disqualified, no mention of a team. Makes no sense and so harder to have any understanding of their motivations. 3) Trying to survive, trying to win: They decide to pool telescope parts so they can "Go home" then a moment later it is back to trying to use it to win, then no, wait, surviving and going home is what its about, no wait, winning again. Real people do not have such random shifts of major motivations and (if it was supposed to) this aspect did not work at all as some sort of complexity of situation/characters. It just seemed unnatural and not believable.4) Tyl the Insecure, Tyl the leader: Tyl flip flops between forceful and spewing leadership jargon from inspirational posters to then doubt himself almost completely. Often you can't guess whether he will be Jeckyl or Hyde in the very next line of dialog. You can say cerebrally, that a person can have conflicting states like this, but as depicted it did not come across to me as any sort of believable character complexity. 5) Exclusive three name is not exclusive: Its made clear that having a "three name" is an academy status thing. KIT laughs at a guy like he is lowlife scum for lacking something so important. Then it turns out to be derived from one's three initials. So everyone has one, academy member or not. Nothing special and so no real kid would care about it so much. How to grasp a world in which the commonplace is something special?

From the beginning, people act like they know what they're doing but we really have no idea what the movie is about.Eventually, we get the plot, more or less. The idea is this is some kind of competition on a deserted planet. This is a sci-fi movie, and the whole movie is filmed at the beach. I got tricked by the label sci-fi and the idea of a foreign planet, but really this is just a bunch of guys at the beach.The movie is bad. I think normally that makes me puke would get a 1. It's not at that level, but it still gets the worst score for the following reason: - Not a single interesting character. I can't distinguish their personality and I don't even now any of their names. - Not a single smile for 99% of the movie. The characters try to act serious the whole time, and smile only to make smart ass comments. - This one ought to convince you: THERE'S NO SINGLE GIRL.