Arcadian (20240.......serves as an example of what happens when young Indie filmmakers become so overly impressed with a mainstream studio film, they slavishly copy it......
We don't even want to imagine the number of times that director Benjamin Brewer and writer Mike Nilon sat through John Krasinski's 2018 "A Quiet Place"......which featured his wife Emily Blunt coping with a post-apocalyptic alien invasion of creatures with ears bigger than the audio array at a Black Sabbath concert.
So once again, we're back in that familiar territory.....a sparsely populated earth with pockets of survivors dodging monsters who've overrun the planet......
In this film, the CG-Eyesores are nocturnal, Grizzly-sized, half-hairy half reptilian beasts. They're given to rapid fire jaw snapping as if their entire heads can turn into wood chippers.....and they make Cocaine Bear looks like Winnie The Pooh.
Writer Nilon's minimalist script offers no explanation for their origins so feel free to supply your own......(Global warming? Aliens? Another Wuhan Lab accident? Side effects on Ozempic users?)
That leaves a dour widower (Nicolas Cage) and his two teenage sons to cope as best they can, scrounging for food and timber before the sun goes down and the monsters come out to play.
Fans salivating to see Cage go to Crazytown might find this entry in his voluminous filmography disappointing.......sorry, no Nutso Nic on view, he's mostly subdued and subtle and there's lengthy chunks of time when he's either offscreen or out of commission. The teens (Jaedon Martell, Maxwell Jenkins) do most of the heavy lifting, along with their cute little shotgun wielding neighbor (Sadie Soverall).
But not to worry, Nic fanboys......when push comes to bite, our favorite loon rouses himself to bring some hurtful Cage-ifying to the unknowable, rampaging horde.
As you'd expect, Team Creature mounts an all out final assault, including the startling sight of the critters forming a giant rolling wheel out of themselves.....which might lead an audience to believe the things are smarter than a bunch of literal snap dragons.
But you shouldn't look to these filmmakers for any info.....or for that matter, any full-fledged movie either. They deliver only their very limited goals.......a monster Cage match. No more, no less.
2 stars (**).
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