STORAGE 24 (2012) Review

Directed by: Johannes Roberts

Starring: Noel Clarke, Colin O'Donoghue, Antonia Campbell-Hughes

It’s been a while since I last saw a really good movie involving aliens, well not really that long I suppose since last year’s SUPER 8 was pretty damn impressive. I never understood what the big deal was about ATTACK THE BLOCK though, but here we have another alien movie from the UK; STORAGE 24. Will it fill the void?

The title refers to where the movie takes place, a 24 hour storage facility. You know those places with rows and rows of locked storage rooms which you can hire and fill with all of your crap. Anyway, right at the start of the movie there is a plane crash, but not just any ordinary plane. This is a military plane and we all know what that means right? Obviously it was carrying some type of top secret cargo which in this case comes in the form of a vicious bipedal alien. After escaping from its container it makes its way into the storage facility to hide out. Electrical problems due to the plane crash are causing the storage facility to have some problems and soon all of its occupants find themselves trapped inside.

Inside the facility we have three friends who are sorting through Shelley’s (Campbell-Hughes) stuff after a break up with her boyfriend. Boyfriend Charlie (Clarke) and friend Mark (O'Donoghue) show up and there’s some whining and bitching (mostly from Charlie) about why they broke up and what went wrong and blah blah blah.
But of course soon they discover that they’re not alone in building and that whatever is after them is fast, cunning, deadly and not human. Now they have more important things to worry about rather than their relationship woes, thank fuck.

You’d think that putting a small group of people in a confined space with a vicious alien would make for good cinema, but I guess it’s not always the case. Firstly the characters are so annoying or bland that you don’t care one way or the other whether they live or die. Secondly the opportunity to create some mood and tension has been completely wasted here and instead we are treated to a lot of pointless arguing and running around as the alien picks these people off one by one.

All of the attack sequences for some reason are filmed in close-up and I found myself just begging for a nice medium shot just so I could actually see what was going on.

Thankfully there is a bit of blood and gore and it’s the good old fashioned practical kind, and the alien itself looks pretty menacing. But the fact remains that too much of the movie is taken up by these annoying characters (mostly Charlie; it’s no wonder your girlfriend dumped you, you whiny little shit) and their stupid relationship subplot. And the ending. Oh the ending. Is that really the best they could come up with? I could not think of a more predictable finish to the film. But at least it fits with the rest of the movie which is also predictable, bland and void of any tension or atmosphere. What they've done here is take an interesting location, a nice, simple premise with plenty of potential and they've just wasted it. As far as alien movies go this year I would rather watch MEN IN BLACK III again, at least it had some laughs and entertainment value.