Film Friday: Rim of the World
Spoiler warning: The following contains mild spoilers for Rim of the World (2019,) which is streaming on Netflix.
When the third season of Stranger Things came out earlier this month, my girlfriend was out of town for work. Since we agreed to wait until she came back to watch it, I wanted to find something to tide me over—something in the “kids riding bikes and having adventures” genre. It’s an amazing genre, but I’d seen ET, It, and even Super 8 too many times. Fortunately, I’d had Rim of the World in my Netflix list for a while, and it looked like the perfect film to fill the void. Sadly, I was mistaken.
Rim of the World centers around four children during an alien invasion. Three of the kids are at the titular Rim of the World Camp, and they meet the fourth in the woods just outside of the camp. An astronaut falls from space right in front of them, opens the door to her shuttle, gives them the key to turning on the weapon to save the world, and then dies. Four children who just met have to take this key to a government laboratory more than 70 miles away to save the world.
It’s not a terribly unique plot, but it’s simple enough that it should be easy to fill. Unfortunately, the plot holes are massive and confusing. The kids are just outside Los Angeles, so close that they stand on a hill and look at the close, smoldering skyline, but outside of one throwaway line of “where did everyone go,” it’s never explained why they almost never run into any people save an army convoy at one point. Additionally, a character in the movie is stabbed in the chest by an alien—right in the heart. He not only doesn’t die but isn’t slowed down much. He briefly passes out later, presumably from blood loss, but is able to wake up and write a note in blood that is integral to the plot before again showing very little trouble with his massive injury.
These weren’t the only plot holes, but they were indicative of the story. The most troubling thing, to me at least, is plot holes can be forgiven if only the movie is fun. Not only does Rim of the World not manage to be fun, it gives me the distinct impression that everyone involved didn’t want to work on it. The story is predictable, which is fine, but the characters at one point literally comment how they are stereotypes of alien invasion movies. It felt like the writer was giving up in front of us. Every shot after the aliens arrive is cast in an aggressive different shade of light. This is never explained but watching a deep yellow shot followed by a blue shot with no real purpose didn’t help—it felt like the lighting design and editors got bored with the movie and started experimenting.
Rim of the World is a fun concept that turned into a really drab movie, which is maybe the most disappointing of movie experiences. I wanted to like it, and I watched the whole thing hoping it would get better. It didn’t. The last line of the movie was someone yelling “we saved the world!” That’s about all you need to know.
Verdict: skip it. Watch ET for the hundredth time if you need to instead.