Today’s quick review: Horizon. Bristol descends into panic when an alien spaceship appears in the sky over the city. Steven (Paul Tonkin) leads a group of friends and family—including Chloe (Alicia Ancel), Nicole (Kate Davies-Speak), and Dan (Simon Pearce)—to take shelter at his parents’ farm in the countryside. But the tide turns when Edward Coleridge (Dan Winter), an alien abductee from the past, asks them to help him stop the invasion.
Horizon is a budget sci-fi adventure about a group of friends trying to prevent an alien invasion. Horizon aims big for a movie of its budget. It features a large cast of survivors, a winding plot with a few secrets to uncover, and occasional action scenes to keep things interesting. But in spite of its ambition, it is held back by its limited budget and tonally mismatched story, making it a niche pick at best.
Horizon has clear flaws. The budget is a problem throughout, manifesting in cheap stunts, unconvincing acting, and limited special effects. Horizon actually does a fair job of working around these limitations, but they are still an impediment. The movie also does a mediocre job with its cast and plot. It avoids the extreme missteps of the worst budget movies, but it still has a hard time telegraphing how all its many pieces fit together.
More importantly, Horizon feels like two stories jammed together. The first is a dark and serious tale of survival at the end of the world, while the second is a jaunty adventure to stop an alien invasion. The tone shifts jarringly when Edward enters the picture, trivializing the death and mayhem of the early part of the movie by shifting to a contrived adventure that Steven, Nicole, and the others have little reason to be involved with.
For all of these faults, the movie has some charm. Relative to its budget, Horizon handles both halves of its story well, and it only runs into trouble when it tries to graft them together. There are extra steps to the invasion that a less ambitious movie would not have bothered with. The movie also has a good sense of what to spend its budget on, scraping together just enough in the way of special effects to make its story work.
Horizon represents an honest effort that is ultimately held back by indecision over what kind of movie it wants to be. If it had committed itself to either a survival drama or a sci-fi adventure and trimmed its loose plot threads, it would have been a tidy budget offering. As it stands, it has a host of flaws that the viewer will have to look past to see its virtues. Budget sci-fi fans may want to take a peek, but others should steer clear.
For another budget alien invasion set in England, try Alien Uprising. For a sci-fi action movie about an alien invasion that has a better plot and much higher production values, try Oblivion, Edge of Tomorrow, or Independence Day.
[3.6 out of 10 on IMDB](https://www.imdb.com/title/tt10310010/). I give it a 4.5 for a credible effort that doesn’t quite pan out.