As with most ambitious things, I'm actually having trouble putting into words exactly why it didn't all work in the end.

While losing a mother to something inexplicable and traumatizing is rough on a person, the only thing we get to see of Aurora's life after her mother vanishes is her dancing in a club having fun with drugs. But we don't SEE her problems or how far she's fallen. There's no real indication of how lost she is before the plot proper kicks in and therefore what kind of hole the Cosmic Dawn is filling. I guess we're supposed to figure she's seeing Alyse as a surrogate mother-figure, but that's all shoved aside at the end with no payoff. We needed more moments like the breakfast singalong, which was the first time in the film that a visual callback worked, showing Aurora getting the same high from her life before. But when I don't know what void she's trying to fill, I wondered why she kept going along with it all.

The script is smart in spots. I'm glad they dropped the Four Years Later/Ago captions real quick, and cleverly use names and ideas dropped into conversations to introduce them, then immediately jump to the other time to illustrate their importance. That connective tissue kept me following the narrative when I wasn't sure from one scene to the next When we were. Maybe a varied visual style between the time periods would have worked better, because Moneo knows how to make interesting cosmic visuals, but I'm not convinced he knows how to shoot slower, character-driven scenes interestingly.

But then there's Tom the Walking Plot Hole. Taking into account the twist at the end that he is, in fact, a True Believer/Reptilicus in disguise/Whatever, it calls into question literally everything he does in the film. If he has always been a believer that Natalie was going to open the doorway, why hide the phone in the woods to call her father and argue with her? If he were a plant to weed out non-believers like Aurora, again, why show doubt away from her? How did Dieter know Aurora would go to see Tom after getting the blue envelope? If we're supposed to think he got converted in the intervening four years, why did Tom try to hide the blue envelope to stop her from going back? Did Tom think she was going to trust him after trying to get her to watch it when Tom wasn't suppose to let her know he knew about the envelope in the first place? Nothing he does makes sense once you get that ending.

Another issue is the lack of a center of gravity for the drama. No offense to Antonia Zegers, who is a fine actress and does great work here, but she is pretty miscast as Alyse. Feel free to disagree - she DOES have some captivating eyes - but she doesn't have the draw and charisma of a cult leader, coming across more like your cool, single Aunt instead (an Aunt Amy from Daria, if you will, but less sarcastic). Most cult leaders seem to have a pretty normal, accessible exterior that peels away once you're in their isolated world, but its just hard to buy into her soft-spoken, floaty performance that commands everyone's loyalty when she's like that from the very beginning. They just seem like a group of weirdos being weird, and no one is drawn to that.

And we need to talk about the "cheepnis" of it all. There are great visuals and better integrated greenscreens than other small budget films, but it was a mistake setting so much of the story in the "Mothership". I didn't buy from the first frame that these were "renovated tunnels", as it looked like a stage from a high school play or a Star Trek TOS set - all neon lights and painted Styrofoam. A real location would have been much more immersive, and maybe allowed for more interesting shots than trackings and shot/reverse shot. The longer we lingered there and had time to examine it all, the more flimsy it looked and the more I was taken out of it.

Maybe its the fact that it left no real room for wondering if it was real or not, maybe it's that the space gods were just reptilian humanoids, but it just didn't work. It doesn't feel like a payoff at the end because it turns out things ARE exactly how they seem, so it didn't feel like any journey of discovery had happened. Yes, her mother was abducted. Yes, the flowers did allow communication. Yes, the cult was telling the truth. If you'd left me on a shot of all the bodies of the cult at the bottom of the cliff where the doorway appeared, it would have recontextualized the whole story. But there was no ambiguity or subtext to the story. I don't know what this was trying to say, and after having just seen it, I can't even take a stab at a guess.

I kept hoping the ending was going to pay off in this slow moving movie. Nope, It cuts from scene to scene quickly, most flashbacks serve no purpose at all. In the end it just seems a Cosmic Yawn.

This film left me bored and confused. I always have trouble with the reasoning behind aliens structuring cosmic-scale events around a 'chosen one' or a rather small group of individuals.

Many questions came to mind that were of course left unanswered. If I am expected to fill in this many blanks myself, I may as well have written the script myself. It probably would have had more coherency.

In my opinion, rental money wasted and invaluable time lost. Find something better to watch. It won't be hard to do.