Alien Siege: a.k.a. "Let's surrender to, then fight against, an invading alien force."

[caption id="attachment_1243" align="alignnone" width="240" caption="Not as cool as "V", and fortunately not as long..."][/caption]
Okay, Earth gets invaded by an alien race called Kulkus. The Kulkus demand eight million humans in exchange for not destroying the Earth. The reason? They need these eight million humans' blood to create an antidote to a virus killing everyone on the Kulkus home world. So these eight million humans aren't going to a happy place by any means, and instead are processed like cattle, treated like lab animals, liquefied, and their fluids sent through a wormhole back to Kulkus. The aliens overseeing the collection process are infected themselves, and have resigned themselves to never returning to their home world, because no living matter can travel through the wormhole. Unless of course they use this doomsday device that they are using to force Earth's compliance.

So it's not a happy story. It's even more depressing seeing governments do the math and decide that they need to pony up the eight million people and hope that the aliens keep their word. It's even more depressing to see the governments do even more math to determine how many people must be surrendered by each country. I don't like having to think about what my government would do in a situation like this, especially when I know in my heart they would probably reach these same conclusions. So Alien Siege loses points with me for making me think instead of just pandering to my need for mindless entertainment.

Then of course we have the resistance in the United States with well meaning people fighting to free those chosen by the lottery system, despite the fact that just means someone else is going to be picked in their place whom they might not be able to save. It seems like a futile circle, except, back to that thinking thing again, I believe as human beings we would do it.

While there are some high thought process ideas in Alien Siege, there are also a lot of plot holes and inconsistencies which keep it from being a great alien invasion movie. Little things like the daughter of the main character being held because her blood contains an anomaly which makes her as valuable as thousands of humans, yet her father is released, even kicked out of the processing center, when he goes to see her. He's scanned, it flashes on the screen that he shouldn't be released because of the anomaly, yet they shove him out the door. There's other stupid details that stuck out for me, like the father having to take his jacket off for the scan, getting kicked out of that office without anything being returned to him, and then having his jacket back on in the very next scene.

There's character inconsistencies, too. One of the main aliens overseeing the collection process has issues with the morality of his assignment, especially when the "anomalies" mean they could stop collecting more humans, yet they continue to do so. Yet he does nothing to stop it. They set up his character to be a force of change, and then... nothing but disappointment, and a feeling of wasted promise. There's also one of the resistance fighters who leads the father right to her commander without more than a blindfold, and a warning that if he moves, she'll hit him. For a bad ass resistance group, that's just lame. She at least turns into a sympathetic, engaging character, but we go back and forth on character motivations the rest of the film, and you just can't keep up, or keep caring.

Brad Johnson (the poor man's Tom Berenger) plays the father, and he is likable enough. Carl Weathers is horribly underused as a member of the United States military charged with making sure the populace complies with the lottery. His character should have been focused on more, because his is one of true inner turmoil, yet we just get a glimpse here and there. Otherwise the cast seems to be mostly culled from General Hospital, so maybe the writers were, too, and that's why the story feels so scattered.

For one viewing, Alien Siege is worth it. But it's definitely not cheesy enough for me, and made me crave a marathon of V: The Series.