Before I get into it, a quick note: this is my two hundredth movie review of the year. Two hundred films, one a day, no exceptions, and Spectral drew the honour of being the milestone. Fittingly, it's a solid, enjoyable, slightly frustrating film that left me wanting more, which is a pretty good summary of the whole endeavour some days.

Spectral is a 2016 military science-fiction film directed by Nic Mathieu in his feature debut, and released on Netflix after Universal originally planned a theatrical run. It stars James Badge Dale as Mark Clyne, a DARPA scientist sent into a war-torn Moldova where soldiers are being killed by invisible, ghost-like entities that only his hyperspectral camera can detect. It was pitched as a "supernatural Black Hawk Down," and honestly, that description does most of the work: it's gritty urban military action with a spectral twist layered over the top.

I'll get straight to it: I had a good time with this one. The pacing never dragged for me, the visuals are genuinely impressive (Weta's involvement in the effects work shows), and the cast all do a perfectly solid job across the board. It simply works as a piece of entertainment. The script has some rough patches, the odd clunky line or convenient turn, but crucially, none of them ever pulled me out of the immersion. It held me the whole way through.

My favourite element was the spectrals themselves. There's an eerie, flowing, weightless quality to the way they move through a scene that looked fantastic every single time they appeared. The design and movement of them is comfortably the most memorable thing the film has to offer, and it elevates the whole experience.

The ending is where things wobble. Without spoiling anything, it's a bit rough and doesn't quite land as cleanly as the build-up deserved. It's not a disaster, but it's the weakest stretch of the film.

Here's my biggest takeaway, and I genuinely mean it as praise: this story would have been fantastic as a limited series on HBO. There's a rich world and a set of ideas here that a single film simply doesn't have the room to properly explore, and I came away wanting far more than I got. Given six episodes to breathe, develop its characters, and dig into its concept, I think there was something genuinely special to be built here. As a film, it can only gesture at that potential.

Nothing about Spectral blew my mind, so I can't sit here and rave about it. But at no point did I regret watching it, and there's real value in a film that just delivers a good, solid, enjoyable evening.