Josh:
You’d think after Devil’s Advocate, Charlize would know better than to marry a pretty boy rising star in over his head with an awful Southern accent who drags her to NYC, but here we are, in this generally awful, egregiously overdirected yet dull film—“a severe insult to the brain,” as they say—and I’d be ready to dismiss it completely if it didn’t have a few compelling minutes wherein our heroine gets advice and abortion pills from Blair Brown (I wish there’d been more of her and Tom Noonan) and tries to terminate her pregnancy against her husband’s will, because in those brief scenes, the horror depicted seemed all too real. ⏰
Steph:
This isn’t a good movie, with the stilted dialogue and the whole alien-rape situation, but there were times I found myself wondering if this could’ve been good—like minus the bad script—like maybe it could’ve been an alien-invasion film about the trauma of pregnancy or motherhood in general instead of just touching on those aspects and, while I found the film adhered to a kind of Final Girl notion, I wouldn’t call it feminist but rather the opposite—a conservative take on maternal instinct and the importance of upholding the traditional nuclear family … but with aliens. ⏰⏰
The Bare Minimum 