Rim of the World follows a group of four teenagers - played by Jack Gore, Miya Cech, Benjamin Flores Jr, and Alessio Scalzotto - who meet at the titular summer camp at the same time as the arrival of aliens who begin attacking Earth. The four strangers come together to stop the aliens, alongside some astronauts who they encounter at a space station. Along the way, they bond and begin to form close friendships as they get to know one another while preventing the world from destruction.
The promotional material for this film tends to evoke the feel of the film It or the series Stranger Things, the latter of which shares the same distributor as this film, Netflix. Both It and Stranger Things feel very much like a movie straight from the 1980’s. In addition to both being set in that time period, they’re both genre pieces as well as coming-of-age tales that feel like they were made by Steven Spielberg or John Hughes.
The fact that this is centered around four teenagers is essentially where this movie’s similarities to It, Stranger Things, or anything remotely similar to them end. Directed by McG - known for the Charlie’s Angels movies and Terminator: Salvation - the film feels like it’s made more for the Nickelodeon crowd. It’s a much more simplistic story with characters that feel all too familiar, with jokes aimed specifically towards a teenage audiences.
The film is written by Zack Stentz, who co-wrote films like Thor and X-Men: First Class, both of which are much better films than this. Here, this marks the first time in which he wrote the screenplay on his own, and it seems clear that having other writers to keep him in check may seem like the better option for him moving forward. Mainly because the dialogue here is just plain bad. It’s the kind of dialogue that a teenager who wanted to sound cool because he saw a bunch of action movies would write down and show off to all his friends to gain a popularity contest.
This sounds harsh, but many of the exchanges here are quite frankly juvenile. Some characters constantly add “bitch” to the end of sentences in an attempt to sound dominant, a trend that everyone would have thought died when it was endlessly parodied once it was used in Breaking Bad. Meanwhile, one character in particular, Dariush, played by Flores, has an endless supply of bad jokes about his genitals as well as horrible pickup lines as he awkwardly attempts to gain the attention of women throughout this, mostly to cringeworthy results.
And what’s unfortunate about this particular character - as much as it pains me to say this - is that out of all the main characters, he’s probably the only one with anything resembling a personality. He’s the only one who’s constantly cracking jokes throughout this movie, and while a good chunk of them are hard to sit through - specifically due to the fact that they’re aimed at the teenage crowd - he actually does manage to get in some funny lines here and there that do inject some much needed life into this otherwise dull movie.
The other three characters are about as cardboard cutout as they get. Jack Gore’s Alex is essentially the poor man’s version of It’s Bill and Stranger Thing’s Mike. Though while both of those characters have much more tragic, complex arcs, Alex’s big personality trait is that he can be a bit timid. Scalzotto’s Gabriel is easily the most forgettable of the bunch, as a young delinquent who escaped juvie. The character barely makes any notable contributions to the plot and it’s almost impossible to recall anything of merit he does to advance the story forward.
Meanwhile, Cech’s Zhen-Zhen is just the oddest of the bunch, starting off by not speaking for the first thirty minutes. At first, this gives her an air of mystery that could have led to a much more interesting backstory, almost something in line with Ally Sheedy’s quiet Allison from The Breakfast Club. However, the movie quickly tosses that notion to the side when she suddenly decides to start speaking up, with the characters making a brief comment that they didn’t think she could actually talk, before moving on, and dropping the schtick altogether.
Despite this being an alien invasion movie, these characters get nearly all of the screen time. The aliens feel like an afterthought here. They’re seen sporadically throughout the movie, popping up occasionally to break up some of the moments that consist of just the four teenagers just hanging around each other or the other human characters. Nothing is ever really learned about these aliens. It’s never revealed why they’re here, what their motivations are, or what’s the true extent of their powers.
The aliens themselves are dull, and when they appear are arguably some of the weaker moments in the film. Despite these moments being the most action packed, stylistically, this movie is pretty boring. There’s a dark aesthetic used for many of the action scenes, and most of these times, it’s difficult to really tell what’s going on. And even when one’s able to discern what’s happening, it’s nothing to write home about. It’s essentially a lot of explosions and random arms swinging around, but that’s about it. There’s a restrained sort of feel, as if the movie’s going for PG levels of action, which is then confusing for the amount of swear words characters will constantly drop.
There have been plenty of films and TV series where it’ll be framed more as a character study, with the genre setting being more of just a background - think The Walking Dead - but in this movie’s case, it just doesn’t work. Mainly due to the fact that most of the film’s time spent with the main characters are just a series of petty arguments and disagreements they have. They’ll squabble over the smallest thing and nitpick nearly everything they say. Which makes it all the more confusing when the film attempts to portray them as friends as events progress.
At no point, does it feel like these characters organically built a grounded relationship that solidifies them as friends. One minute they’re disagreeing with one another, and the next minute, they act like best friends, with maybe only a line or two of dialogue to explain away the sudden change of heart. This includes a particularly cringeworthy subplot in which Alex and Zhen-Zhen suddenly build a romance that comes totally out of nowhere, with the only line of dialogue that indicates any sort of “chemistry” between them is Alex asking Zhen-Zhen if girls find confidence attractive. The film does nothing else to indicate any sort of feelings between the two characters before they share a kiss later on in the film.
There’s an attempt at giving all the characters some more complexity where they spout off parts of their backstories in one sequence, but this doesn’t happen until nearly the last act of the movie, when they’ve done nothing of real interest before that. Not only is this too little too late, but the movie essentially glosses over this whole moment. The characters just shout out what used to trouble them like it’s almost a throwaway line before quickly brushing it all off to just get back to the main story.
Rim of the World at first comes off like it’s going to continue the trend of evoking coming-of-age 80’s-themed entertainment, but instead goes in the total opposite direction. Its characters are totally bland, its aliens are lifeless, its action scenes are dull, its jokes are flat, and its story is far from believable. It has a fair amount of enjoyable moments thanks simply to one character who is far from being written all that well with himself, but for every solid moment this movie has, it’s followed by a long series of painfully uninteresting, overly-simplistic moments that may only appeal to a young teenage crowd. One of Netflix’s weakest releases of the year thus far, this needs to stay as close to the rim of the world as possible.
Recommendation: Avoid It
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