film review: Save Yourselves!

 

Directed & written by Alex H. Fischer & Eleanor Wilson

ChinoKino score: B-

Review by Allan Tong

A tongue-in-cheek comedy about social media, Save Yourselves! is a fun, likable film centering on a  Brooklyn couple named Jack (John Reynolds) and Su (Sunita Mani). Like countless millennials, they are addicted to their devices. Phones, laptops, you name it. However, they fear that all this connectedness disconnects them from the real world. So, they jump on a friend's offer to stay at his isolated cabin in the woods so they can unplug and go e-cold turkey for a few days. What could go wrong?

An alien invasion, for one. Because Jack and Su have disconnected, they have no idea that a swarm of aliens, which look like oversized puffballs, have seized planet Earth. All hell is breaking loose around the globe while our couple live the unwired life. Eventually, they encounter one of these puffballs and notice weird things happening around the cabin, like empty whisky bottles (apparently aliens like to party). Jack and Su break down and finally check their massive backlog of voice-mails and texts to learn that Earth is doomed.

 

Essentially, this is a two-hander about Jack and Su, and the two leads are believable and likable. The premise is clever. The execution, though, could have been tighter. There's a lot of set-up and time spent before the aliens make their entrance. Same goes for Jack and Su detecting that something's wrong--this drags on. The film needs to tease the audience more before the big reveal. It also needs more battles between our couple and the evil aliens, more obstacles thrown in their path and more story twists. When they do appear, it's late in the game. 

Despite these flaws, this is still a fun ride.