If
you live on a Maine island, follow the Mormons’ advice and always have at least
six months of food on-hand. As everyone should know by now from Stephen King, it
sure is easy for those little islets to get cut off from the mainland. This
time it is bestselling author Tess Gerritsen who is picking off islanders one-by-one
in her screenplay for her son Josh Gerritsen’s Island Zero (trailer
here),
which releases today on VOD.
These
used to be rich waters for fish and crustaceans, but nobody has caught anything
for weeks. That is because Sam the high-strung marine biologist poisoned the
waters to prove his wild-eyed theory. Okay, actually there is some kind of previously
undiscovered primordial super-predator species swarming out there. Really, that
sounds more believable?
In
any event, the aqua-things have severed all contact with the island, so they
can do to the inhabitants what they did to the fishery waters. It is
particularly personal for Sam. His late wife was killed by these creatures
while tracking their movements for her research. Sam’s young daughter and sort
of ex-girlfriend are also trapped on the island, so there’s that too. They have
no authority figure to speak of, accept Dr. Maggie (island folk are informal),
a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, who is covering at the local clinic until
they can recruit a full-time Joel Fleischman.
Zero looks like it was
produced on a budget of fifty dollars and a couple of Dunkin Donuts gift cards,
but the first half is oddly entertaining in a throwback kind of way.
Unfortunately, it squanders that good will in a stupid second half. Naturally,
the military starts to cast an evil shadow over the proceedings, because their
motives are always suspect. Honestly, the armed forces can never win in a movie
like this. Either they are callously sacrificing human life for the sake of
some sort of technology with dubious military applications or they are recklessly
trying to destroy a sentient species we could learn so much from. It is more
the former in this case.
For
the sake of its anti-military bias, Zero completely
throws logic out the window. Seriously, if they wanted to conduct business with
the sea monkeys from Hell, why didn’t they evacuate the island first? They
could have easily generated a cover story—they’re the military. Instead, they leave
a few dozen islanders around to gum up the works.
Still,
it is cool to see a character actor like Laila Robbins take the de facto lead.
She is credibly cool, collected, and battle-hardened as Dr, Maggie. The rest of
the ensemble is rather hit-or-miss, but she can carry them for about forty-five
minutes or so.
Josh
Gerritsen actually does a nice job at times conveying the mounting fear and
claustrophobia of the islanders in their state of siege, but this is nothing
like The Thing (either of them, the
real ones). Unfortunately, the film always slavishly does what we expect it to
do, even when it doesn’t make much sense. Frustratingly, we just can’t
recommend Zero Island when it
launches today on VOD platforms, including iTunes.
