Respond to these rapid questions in our Captive State quiz and we will tell you which Captive State character you are. Play it now.
The concept of “Captive State” is admirable, as is the reasoning behind it. The execution, on the other hand, is far from perfect. In this thriller about an alien invasion, the majority of the time is spent avoiding mass destruction and firefights. Instead, the story follows the humans on the ground as they go about their daily lives and, eventually, as they carry out an elaborate plan of subterfuge in order to try to spark a global uprising against the extraterrestrial invasion. Aliens make only a few cameo appearances in Rupert Wyatt’s film, which he co-wrote and directed. Thrills of almost any kind, on the other hand, are almost completely absent from the experience.
After a brief and hurried explanation of the alien invasion, Wyatt and Erica Beeney’s screenplay introduces two younger versions of the film’s protagonists who witness their parents’ bloody deaths (which are instantly exploded into red mist by an alien blaster), which is followed by an audio montage of news reports. The governments of the world quickly submit after making first, violent contact with the aliens, who fly around in boulder-like ships and whose droopy hair transforms into jagged quills as a result of the contact.
The rest is made up of a series of text messages sent from an old computer. The extraterrestrials have taken over as the world’s legislators. To allow humans to work in vast, underground tunnels to harvest the planet’s natural resources, certain parts of major cities have been closed off and designated as “closed zones” (what a clever name for such a simple concept). It appears that some of the alien leadership also resides and operates down there, because otherwise the film’s conclusion would be even more anticlimactic than it already is.
A lot of information is thrown at us in the first few minutes of the film; therefore, it is likely that some of the specifics of this synopsis will be slightly inaccurate. It’s not as if the film itself is particularly concerned with the specifics of its plot. Once we’ve digested the barrage of information that occurs during and immediately after the opening credits, the screenplay deliberately leaves us scrambling for whatever information we can glean from the mysterious and late-explained actions of vaguely defined characters with obscure motivations.
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This is really to say that, while the movie does eventually provide the bare bones of a plot, it takes an inordinate amount of time to get there. There is little reason to care about the movie’s characters, its world, or the low-key interpretation of a well-known science-fiction story in the meantime.
Parts of the city of Chicago have been designated as a closed zone nine years after the invasion began. A data-collection facility on the city’s Lower West Side employs Gabriel (Ashton Sanders), whose job involves uploading the contents of memory cards and hard drives onto a distant alien server (apparently for research purposes, though it’s mostly for the purposes of providing convenient back story to explain the film’s final twists—if you can call withholding basic character information “a twist”).
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His whereabouts are kept under surveillance by William Mulligan (John Goodman), a local detective who was once a partner of Gabriel’s late father’s police department and is now working for the aliens. Mulligan is looking for information about Gabriel’s older brother Rafe (Jonathan Majors), who was allegedly killed in an attack on the aliens a few years prior.
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The brothers are reunited after a series of convoluted and imprecisely explained maneuvers are carried out. Rafe can now begin one final attempt to lead an attack on the aliens, using the information provided to him by Gabriel in the hopes of sparking a worldwide revolt against humanity’s captors.
The narrative shifts perspectives several times, with little attention paid to the characters as anything other than pieces in the plot’s game. After being introduced to him and being persuaded that he will be a significant character, Gabriel is trapped by alien drones for an extended period of time, allowing Rafe to carry out his scheme. Unlike Rafe, who blends into the background of his own scheme, the focus is on the minute details of a group of rebels who have volunteered to plant an explosive device on a local government official before he meets with members of the alien legislature. Rafe, on the other hand, is completely ignored.
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This scheme and its aftermath take up the majority of the film’s running time, and we are never given any significant information about any of the participants at any point. The same can be said for the movie’s major characters, including Mulligan, who serves as the film’s backbone during the third act of the film. He is able to explain away his seemingly contradictory decisions thanks to a minute-long flashback to his childhood home movie.
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All of this eventually makes sense, so it would be unfair to characterize “Captive State” as messy or incoherent at this point. Although the film has a lack of specificity and an unsteady grasp on pacing or structure, it definitely appears to be that way, and isn’t that what matters?
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