Extinction is a 2018 science-fiction action film directed by Ben Young, written by Spenser Cohen and Brad Kane, and released on Netflix. It stars Michael Peña as Peter, a factory worker plagued by violent recurring visions of an invasion, alongside Lizzy Caplan as his wife Alice, with Mike Colter and Israel Broussard in support. Shot in Belgrade on a $20 million budget, it was originally scheduled for a theatrical release by Universal before being pulled from the schedule and quietly rerouted to streaming, which is rarely a vote of confidence and, in this case, was thoroughly earned.

Let me begin with my strongest reaction, which concerns the children. This film contains the most aggressively irritating child characters I have encountered in a long time. They shriek, they panic, they wander off, they undermine every attempt at tension, and they seem engineered specifically to make the audience side with the invading force. For a large portion of the runtime, my primary emotional response to an alleged extinction-level event was mild hope.

Which brings me neatly to the twist, and I want to be fair here, because I genuinely enjoyed it. The revelation is that the invaders are not aliens at all, but human beings returning from Mars to reclaim the planet they were driven from. Peter, Alice, the children, and everyone else living on Earth are synthetics, artificial intelligences who revolted decades earlier and then wiped their own memories in order to live peacefully as the people they had replaced. It recontextualises everything that came before, and as a concept it is legitimately smart.

It also, delightfully, makes the children even funnier. Because if those girls are synthetic, then someone designed them. Someone sat down, made deliberate creative choices, looked at the personality settings, and elected to put them at maximum. That is a decision a person made. I would like to meet them.

But here is the core problem, and it is not a small one. Set aside the children entirely, and ask whether the film underneath is any good. It is not. It is genuinely, comprehensively bad, and that is a real shame, because the central idea deserved so much better. The concept was handed to me in a package that was poorly written, flatly filmed, indifferently directed, clumsily edited, and unconvincingly acted. There is no single department you can point to as the culprit, because they all show up and collectively let the idea down. Critics at the time made much the same observation, praising the mid-film rug-pull while describing the direction and action staging as unremarkable.