Concept art of a key scene in Spectral (via conceptworld)
Spectral is a 93-minute feature length Netflix Original movie, and part of their aggressively expanding output of self-produced content. Starring actor James Badge Dale as DARPA engineer/scientist, Dr. Mark Clyne.
As an engineer myself, I can’t help but get a kick out of an engineer protagonist. The me of my childhood would have loved this for the action and the “science”. Or at least what was passed off as science.
Sometime in the near future, a group of US Special Forces on some unspecified assignment in Moldova is seeing ghostly, “spectral,” shapes with their new helmet mounted enhanced vision equipment. When it appears that that one of these anomalies may have killed one of the soldiers, help is demanded. The help comes in the form of Dr. Clyne who is called out on location for a bit of field service. After his arrival, the situation rapidly deteriorates and all eyes turn to Clyne for answers.
The acting is perfectly serviceable. At no time did I find myself cringing from woodenly delivered lines or from an over the top, emotionally laden speech, so common whenever soldiers of any sort are portrayed in film. It is just a really fun SciFi film that has a level production value that I wish could be seen in a lot of other small budget SciFi films. We also get to see some aircraft and robots that take design cues from the dropship in Aliens and the Tachikoma multilegged robots from Ghost in the Shell.
Spectral isn’t perfect by any stretch though. It leans pretty heavily against quite a few worn-out film tropes. For starters, the soldiers are initially mistrustful and hostile toward the egghead. We are also treated to a MacGyver/A-Team style equipment building montage. During the montage, a glue gun being shoved into the workings of an anti-spectral rifle is accompanied by the sound of a cordless screwdriver.
Tired old tropes and lazy sound effects aside, the film is still very enjoyable. Any engineers or engineering types, you may not like it if you watch with the same critical eye reserved for completing DFMEA’s or design reviews. However, if you can reign in your professional critique of all things technological, then just lay back, and enjoy it. A brain-buster it is not.
A big 3 out of 5.