Film Review: Lumina is hardly luminous

Pictured at Top: Ken Lawson (George), Rupert Lazarus (Alex), Sidney Nicole Rogers (Patricia), Andrea Tivadar (Delilah).

Low-budget alien-abduction thriller back in theatres months after its July debut

Despite an early glimmer of promise, Lumina turns out to be surprisingly obscure in spite of its title. Rather than luminous, it’s a muddle mixture of alien abduction thriller and love story. The attempt to ground the fantasy in a convincing romantic relationship is undermined by a narrative that feels like the darkly unhinged ramblings of a conspiracy nut. Nothing sensible ever comes to light, and when the film reaches its big finale, it feels like a proof-of-concept demo reel of special effects and action sequences strung together almost at random. Instead of a thrill of suspense, a pang of emotional distress, or a glint of revelation, audiences are more like to watch the action through tears of laughter.

Wealthy Alex (Rupert Lazarus) is throwing a party for his finance, Tatiana (Eleanor Williams), so of course he invites his old girlfriend. Alex’s friend Patricia (Sidney Nicole Rogers), who for some reason lives with him, thinks this is a bad idea, and she’s right. When Delilah (Andrea Tivadar) shows up, she immediately confides to Patricia that she plans to replace Tatiana. Her plan is short-circuited when Tatiania disappears amidst a storm of inexplicable electrical activity.

Months later, Alex is a shell of his former self until he embraces the beliefs of his friend George (Ken Lawson), a UFO conspiracy theorist, who believes that Tatiania was abducted by aliens. Hoping to bring Alex to his senses, Patricia invites Delilah back, even though Alex (understandably) wants nothing more to do with her since learning of her attitude toward Tatiania. George introduces Alex to Thom (Eric Roberts), who tells Alex everything he needs to know before inexplicably attempt to kill him and his friends. Undeterred, Alex leads his friends on a cross-country (and trans-Atlantic) search for his missing fiancé, relying on little but instincts and feelings to lead the way.

The above synopsis probably makes the plot sound less incoherent than it actually is. The film wants to present itself as representing the experiences described by self-proclaimed UFO-abductees. The problem is that these stories often include confusing elements that do not add up, even though conspiracy theorists are eager to connect the random dots into a Grand Unified Theory of Alien Abduction.

This approach blows holes in a story that, at its heart should be simple and engaging: a man searching for his lost love – except that Alex ends up searching among the stars instead of descending into the underworld like Orpheus. Furthermore, the contrived character interaction prevents us from engaging with Alex’s quest in a way that would help us forgive the scattershot narrative.

Eventually, the audience is “rewarded” when Alex and his team find a secret underground base apparently inhabited by both human military and aliens. The settings and the alien creatures are not too bad, but like everything else in the movie, there is little to elucidate the murky situation. Why do aliens abduct humans but stow them in a human military base instead on their spaceship? Not that everything needs an info dump explanation, but the script should at least provide enough clues for the audiences to reach their own conclusions, even if those conclusions remain tentative.

Things finally spill over into absurdity when our characters escape from the base where they are being hunted and find themselves teleported to an alien landscape; unhappy with the location, they retreat into the base and then teleport somewhere else equally unsatisfactory, and since they have no way of knowing where they will end up, the repeated attempts become funnier with each repetition. The ensuing scenes add nothing to the story, but they do provide an opportunity for dune buggy chase between Alex and an alien. Mad Max, it’s not.

Lumina Review: Conclusion

It’s hard to guess why anyone thought Lumina worthy of a reissue months after it first appeared in theatres. This is the sort of indie film that typically opens day-and-date on home video and just enough movie screens to call itself a “theatrical” release.

To give the film what credit it is due, the cast seem to be trying their best with the material, and Eric Roberts (who has made a recent career out of doing these low-budget cameos) even appears onset with his fellow actors instead of being edited in later. The production values are not bad, and for the most part the film avoids betraying its limited budget.

The action-filled finale is silly, but it’s not inconceivable that it could have worked in the context of a story that made sense and had believable stakes. Instead, everything feels as if it were thrown at the window like messy spaghetti to see what might stick. And stick it does, blotting out any glimmer of illumination there might have been.