Even During the Apocalypse, It’s Never Too Late to Grow Up

Sunita Mani and John Paul Reynolds in 
"Save Yourselves!"
Photo Credit: RottenTomatoes.com

When focusing on films about alien invasions, big-budget special-effects movies like Steven Spielberg’s “War of the Worlds” and Roland Emmerich’s “Independence Day” probably come to mind.  While these aren’t the type of stories that one would associate with anything outside of blockbusters, smaller-scale narratives can work just as well when focusing on this section of the sci-fi genre.

Writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson accomplish this with their comedy, “Save Yourselves!”, which is their feature filmmaking debut.  Despite a story in which it might take awhile for you to get involved, this still manages to be a light and entertaining trip through the apocalypse.

Wanting to disconnect from their phones, laptops, and other forms of communication, a Brooklyn couple, Su (Sunita Mani) and Jack (John Paul Reynolds) decides to spend a week at a friend’s house in upstate New York and improve their relationship.  They soon realize that, having disconnected themselves from all media, they’ve missed news about an alien takeover. Once the extraterrestrials reach the house, Su and Jack will have to learn how to fend for themselves.

For much of the movie, Mani and Reynolds are the only two people.  With the time that Su and Jack spend together, Mani and Reynolds uphold a fun chemistry that makes their characters fun to follow.  Su and Jack share a loving connection where, even if the characters themselves aren’t too engaging at first, Mani and Reynolds at least inhabit their roles genuinely enough to get us interested in their characters at the start of the movie.  As the story goes on, their characters examine their insecurities and the problems in their relationship, leading to some memorable interactions between Mani and Reynolds that hold the right balance of humor and drama.  These dialogues that they share soon add some depth to their characters that make them more interesting than they are in the beginning.

The screenplay by Fischer and Wilson may paint the main characters as typical Brooklyn hipsters at the start, but it soon becomes a rather heartwarming story about what it means to have to grow up in a time of crisis.  There’s some witty dialogue here and there to sustain the so-so first half, but as the movie goes on and Su and Jack find themselves having to take on more responsibilities to get through the invasion, the second half of the story invests you more in Su and Jack’s journey and does well in examining its central theme.

As directors, Fischer and Wilson decide to forgo big set pieces, and instead go for more character work and establishing a sci-fi story that’s built on emotion, rather than thrills.  Not that there’s anything wrong with thrills in an alien-invasion story, but for a minimalist movie like this, a story built on characters and dialogue tends to work better.  Fischer and Wilson make this the case for “Save Yourselves!”, showing that a movie about an apocalyptic event can still be explored just as in depth with smaller-scale stories.

Grade: B+