The Color Out Of Space (2010) is a truly puzzling creature. On the one hand, it’s quite well made, featuring excellent and cinematography, and while the pacing could have been improved, it wasn’t awful.
On the other hand, the story falls into the What The Hell? category. My Arts Editor may have summed it up best: aliens fly down from outer space, dine on some human, regenerate, and leave.
Yeah, that’s about as good as it gets. Really.
Based on the story of the same name by H. P. Lovecraft, it didn’t try to help the audience much, and in a way that sort of aesthetic decision, similar to that of Arrival (2016), is admirable. It forces the mind open in order to try to understand just what’s going on, rather than providing a framework from which to watch the story, an inevitable part of most stories, and yet an element that must be handled with delicacy.
But this movie fails to hook the audience early, and rather than flopping around in the storytellers boat, we speed away from the story, little understand, and less caring.
