STORAGE 24: mildly diverting but filled with more stupid characters than you can shake a stick at!
Ever have one of those films that your friends won’t stop hounding you to watch?
If you have friends like mine, then you’ve no doubt had this experience. The upside to it all is that you do have like-minded souls looking out for your best interests. The downside? Well, maybe you find out that they either don’t know what your best interests are OR they’re horribly misinformed. You end up learning more about your friends than you do any particular film, and that’s my story and I’m sticking to it with STORAGE 24, a relatively benign one-off SciFi-lite flick brought to you in part by DOCTOR WHO’s Noel Clarke.
(NOTE: The following review will contain minor spoilers necessary solely for the discussion of plot and/or characters. If you’re the type of reader who prefers a review entirely spoiler-free, then I’d encourage you to skip down to the last paragraph for my final assessment. If, however, you’re accepting of a few modest hints at ‘things to come,’ then read on …)
From the product packaging: “London is in chaos after a military cargo plane crashes, leaving its highly classified contents strewn across the city. Completely unaware that London is on lockdown, exes Charlie and Shelley, accompanied by best friends Mark and Nikki, are trapped in the Storage 24 facility - a dark maze of endless corridors - with a mysterious predator hunting them one by one.”
Ridley Scott’s ALIEN is a singularly epic genre-defining film: it took basically the idea of any good horror film and set it in space … where no one can hear you scream (as opposed to all of the Earthlings who just ignored you). It gave the ax murderer an all-new life (or is that lifeform?) by putting an entirely unearthly face on him, and then set him about his business bumping off one unfortunate crew member after another while 20th Century Fox raked in millions compliments of a job well done. Since that time, storytellers have tried to duplicate the formula by simply changing the venue. Instead of aliens loose on a spaceship, we’ve seen them loose in any other number of environments, preserving the ‘locked room’ premise in order to save the resulting tension.
To mild effectiveness, STORAGE 24 transplants the alien down to earth – making it the escapee fleeing some secret government incarceration ala THE X-FILES – and sets our killer on-the-lam inside a storage facility under lockdown. The victims? Well, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that the resident staff might be in dire jeopardy, so why not throw in a few errant customers who’ve come by to pick up their belongings for good measure? And – to top it off – have them be young people (they always make the most delicious victims), have them know one another, and have them in conflict, eh?
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with experiencing some vicarious thrill with a nearly brain-dead flick the likes of STORAGE 24. For the most part, it’s well-made, though director Johannes Roberts felt some undying need to capture about 90% of the film in close-ups. I’m all for enjoying the young, wrinkle-free faces of some fresh British talent … but constantly? Methinks Roberts thought he was directly ratcheting up the claustrophia of the setting, but there are far more ways to accomplish that than flooding the silver screen with Noel Clarke’s pores. It’s hard to get a sense of ‘presence’ when you’re only seeing faces; it works just fine for the horror-fueled sequences, but someone should’ve counseled the director on another course of action for drama’s sake.
Also, STORAGE 24 has more than its fair share of dumb characters moments (did no one ever think of simply running away constantly? why do so many people stand and gawk at an alien?) and even dumber gaps in logic (why are so many locked storage units so darn well lit? how does an alien so astonishingly tall fit into ceiling crawlspace? why didn’t the fireworks set off the visible sprinkler system?). To a degree, one expects stupid people to populate a horror film; this isn’t always the case when morphing a story into the realm of Science Fiction. Granted, these were supposed to be ‘everyman’ characters coming face-to-face with an alien intelligence, so I get that there wasn’t a Stephen Hawking in the bunch; still, I expect a screenwriter to recognize breakdowns in logic and fix them so that I don’t have to raise the questions.
Now all of this that I’ve written isn’t meant to say that STORAGE 24 is a complete waste of time or film because that’s far from the truth. At worst, it’s a bit of a teen-beat melodramatic mess, but – at best (and I always try to find a silver lining with each and every film I see) – it’s a mildly entertaining alien-themed distraction that serves up some reasonable scares and even a few good laughs. (Cue the wind-up puppy for its own franchise!) Of course, it isn’t all supposed to be taken so seriously – it is a film, after all. Turn off your brain and have fun with it, probably as much fun as the blokes had throwing it together.
There’s absolutely nothing wrong with experiencing some vicarious thrill with a nearly brain-dead flick the likes of STORAGE 24. For the most part, it’s well-made, though director Johannes Roberts felt some undying need to capture about 90% of the film in close-ups. I’m all for enjoying the young, wrinkle-free faces of some fresh British talent … but constantly? Methinks Roberts thought he was directly ratcheting up the claustrophia of the setting, but there are far more ways to accomplish that than flooding the silver screen with Noel Clarke’s pores. It’s hard to get a sense of ‘presence’ when you’re only seeing faces; it works just fine for the horror-fueled sequences, but someone should’ve counseled the director on another course of action for drama’s sake.
Also, STORAGE 24 has more than its fair share of dumb characters moments (did no one ever think of simply running away constantly? why do so many people stand and gawk at an alien?) and even dumber gaps in logic (why are so many locked storage units so darn well lit? how does an alien so astonishingly tall fit into ceiling crawlspace? why didn’t the fireworks set off the visible sprinkler system?). To a degree, one expects stupid people to populate a horror film; this isn’t always the case when morphing a story into the realm of Science Fiction. Granted, these were supposed to be ‘everyman’ characters coming face-to-face with an alien intelligence, so I get that there wasn’t a Stephen Hawking in the bunch; still, I expect a screenwriter to recognize breakdowns in logic and fix them so that I don’t have to raise the questions.
Now all of this that I’ve written isn’t meant to say that STORAGE 24 is a complete waste of time or film because that’s far from the truth. At worst, it’s a bit of a teen-beat melodramatic mess, but – at best (and I always try to find a silver lining with each and every film I see) – it’s a mildly entertaining alien-themed distraction that serves up some reasonable scares and even a few good laughs. (Cue the wind-up puppy for its own franchise!) Of course, it isn’t all supposed to be taken so seriously – it is a film, after all. Turn off your brain and have fun with it, probably as much fun as the blokes had throwing it together.
(MILDLY) RECOMMENDED.
STORAGE 24 is one of those films I’ve heard tons about from folks who’ve heartily recommended it, but – for whatever reasons – it just never caught my interest. I finally decided to give it a go on Amazon TV, and – while I wasn’t all that disappointed – I wasn’t entirely impressed either. For reasons that defy logic, director Johannes Roberts decided to shoot everything in so ridiculously tight close-ups that at times I found it hard to discern exactly what was going on. There’s nothing wrong with cinematographical technique, but even a film – like a SciFi monster – has got to breath, Johannes!
STORAGE 24 is one of those films I’ve heard tons about from folks who’ve heartily recommended it, but – for whatever reasons – it just never caught my interest. I finally decided to give it a go on Amazon TV, and – while I wasn’t all that disappointed – I wasn’t entirely impressed either. For reasons that defy logic, director Johannes Roberts decided to shoot everything in so ridiculously tight close-ups that at times I found it hard to discern exactly what was going on. There’s nothing wrong with cinematographical technique, but even a film – like a SciFi monster – has got to breath, Johannes!