Film Review: Aliens Night (short film) (2014)

SYNOPSIS:

Tells the story of an attempt by some aliens to abduct a girl who will fight hard to save her life.

REVIEW:

Short films are awesome. Compact stories with little to no background information that force you to draw conclusions for yourself. A few shorts have been sent my way for review and I’m very excited about that.

Unfortunately, it’s difficult to review a short film without ruining it for the next viewer. But I will do the best I can to avoid any spoilers.

SO this first short is called ALIENS NIGHT.

Imagine if you will: You are a pretty young scientist, studying biology and reading a lot of science fiction. Yours is a pretty uneventful life until one night, THEY come. That’s right, the aliens are here! It should be an amazing thing, except the aliens are not exactly ET kind of friendly. What else to do but find a way to survive the long night.

Written, directed, edited and CGI render by Andrea Ricca. Most short films usually work this way, and with shorts this sort of “one man band” credit doesn’t scare me as much as with features. The aliens look great. They are nicely modeled and blended well into the real world background. And you get good, long looks at them, too. None of this darting through the shadows nonsense.

There’s a lot of other CGI effects as well, but again…spoilers. Suffice it to say that the computer effects in this short are pretty good. A few moments where things are not perfect, but on the whole impressive.

The young scientist is played by Stefania Autuori (my latest nominee for best name ever). There is no spoken dialogue in the film at all, and the actress expresses everything through facial expressions and body language.

Not much else I can say without crossing that spoiler line, but I did enjoy this short. The story is self contained and pretty much tells you everything you need to know about what is happening. And I loved the ending. Short, sweet, and to the point.

So rating with my special “short scale” on a scale of one to five (five being awesome), I’m giving this film three little aliens.