There are films of all shapes and sizes with various budgets.  The size of the budget doesn’t always indicate the quality of the movie. More often than not the smaller the budget the less the quality, with a few exceptions like A24, NEON, or even Blumhouse. Lumina is the type of film that falls into the latter category though. It’s a small movie that isn’t very good at all.

A group of friends meet at one of their palatial estates in California. They are all friends and some of them have a history with one another. While they are all having a good time they notice some lights in the desert off in the distance. When the light gets closer they realize they are from a spacecraft. The craft hovers over the house and one of the house guests gets beamed up or evaporated whichever suits the situation better. This causes the owner of the house whose girlfriend it was who got beamed up to go off the deep end. 

The cast that the writer/director Gino McCoy has assembled is mostly unknown to me Patricia (Sydney Nicole Rogers) is a friend of the house owner, Alex,(Rupert Lazarus) the owner of the house and boyfriend of the missing girl,  Tatiana (Eleanor Williams) the missing girl that got beamed up and  Delilah (Andrea Tivadar) a friend of the group and an old love interest of the house owner. This cast is just not that good for a film like this. A subpar movie at least needs a good cast the get fans’ minds off of how bad it is and this one doesn’t have it.

There are things about the plot and script that are just not good. One in particular is when the movie skips six months in time the lead character of Alex has grown a beard. It is such an obvious plot device to show the passing of time. Some clues pop up and he and his roommate and surviving friends decide to go explore them. Which causes a road trip to transpire. This takes up a lot of the running time of the film. Which causes it to drag. A whole lot of nothing happens during the first hour and a half of this movie.

The movie looks pretty good considering its bad script and acting. The cinematography is quite beautiful.  There are many shots of mountains in the distance, dunes, and so forth during the road trip abroad in upper Africa, Morocco to be specific,  as well as the shots in the distance in California and the house which looks great. The movie had a cinematographer, that’s for sure. The look of the film can’t save the other things that are just not good at all.

The third act of the movie is inexplicably bad and goes in a crazy sci-fi direction. I couldn’t believe what I was watching. There are aliens, bad fight scenes, old video tapes that are shown to get some of the story out for the viewer watching, and a mysterious military base out in the middle of the desert. A subplot of alien objections is given as the reason for all of this, but it’s not done very well at all. In better directorial hands this may be much better.

Lumina is a sci-fi film that Waits until the last hour to show the sci-fi elements completely.  Up until then, the movie drags as it’s mostly a road trip film. Bad acting from the entire cast including a guest appearance from Eric Roberts doesn’t help matters. The script is also very conventional in its scope and feel. In better hands regarding the direction, this might have been a decent movie. In McKoy’s hands, it’s very amateurish. This could have been made by any film school kid from anywhere in the country.  It has that kind of bad tone to it, unfortunately.  Which is not a good thing.

1 star

Dan Skip Allen