By Simon Thompson
Writer/director Brian Hanson’s The Bunker is a visually impressive and well-acted horror-sci-fi movie, which sadly suffers from a cliched and forgettable script by both Hanson and co-writer Charles L Bunce. To use a baking analogy, The Bunker is a movie which resembles an elaborate stuffed chocolate cake, which, while looking impressive on the one hand, falls apart as soon as someone tries to cut themselves a slice.
The plot of The Bunker centres around a series of mysterious alien spaceships suddenly appearing in the skies around Earth. With no idea of what the occupants of these ships intend, the protagonist, a scientist named Doctor Michelle Riley ( Chelsea Edmundson), and various other scientist colleagues are drafted in by the US military to create a bio-weapon to use on the aliens. But as Michelle is sealed underground to work on the project, she begins to discover that there is something sinister at play.
Aesthetically The Bunker draws largely from classic science fiction movies from around the 1970s-1990s for its look; there are flashes of both the original Terminator and Aliens in the film’s underground laboratory setting, the alien ships themselves are modelled clearly after Close Encounters Of The Third Kind, and the claustrophobic nature of the underground lab and crew quarters are reminiscent of The Thing and Event Horizon.
Tonally, The Bunker has a lot in common with the science fiction video games Half Life and Mass Effect, as well as more modern sci-fi such as Danny Boyle’s Sunshine and Denis Villeneuve’s Arrival, in that the intellectual and the cerebral is pushed further to the forefront rather than action. As well integrated as these visual influences are, Hanson and Bunce’s script does nothing new with them whatsoever, instead hashing them together as some kind of depressing collage of movies that, unlike The Bunker, leave a timelessly indelible mark upon viewing.
A large problem with The Bunker is that it was shot during Covid, so as a direct consequence the cast couldn’t be in the same room with one another for long periods of time, so most of their interactions are on futuristic Zoom. This lack of direct interaction hurts the overall chemistry of the various actors-which is a shame when you have an absolute legend like Tony Todd in the cast and he’s barely able to bounce off the rest of the actors.
To conclude, The Bunker, while being a very well made moderately budgeted horror movie, is an extremely frustrating watch because it has so much going for it that it ends up doing very little with. Put another way- The Bunker is the cinematic equivalent of Hatem Ben Afra, you might see an incredible no look pass or an outrageous goal of the month contender but more often than not you’re only left with flashes of its true potential.
The Bunker was screened as part of Frightfest 2024.
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