Science fiction is the perfect genre to allow yourself to lose any creative restraints you feel are limiting you from telling the story you’ve always wanted to tell. After all, sci-fi is where the impossible becomes possible, and the unimaginable becomes a reality, regardless of how well it goes for the characters of the story. Ambition in sci-fi storytelling is necessary, otherwise you’ll end up repeating a story someone else has already done.
There’s no denying the ambitious undertone of Lumina, a science fiction that has been thrown to the deepest levels of film consideration. This is a sci-fi premise with a poor execution that misses all the marks while trying to nail the unnecessary ones. It has a serious problem of inconsistency in all the key parts of the story, but it’s not a horrible feature. By the standards of indie cinema, it indulges in excess, with ridiculous scenes and over-the-top storylines that are uncalled for. But horrible? Nah. I’ve seen much worse.
The film follows a set of characters who witness an otherworldly event in which one of them gets abducted by alien entities. Alex is the victim who has lost his loved one in the event, and contrary to the norm, he goes on the hunt alongside a girl who also likes him. Others join the search party, and Lumina suddenly turns into another film, one that will take you through wide plains of deserted territories that hold a portal to another world. In the middle of this journey, Lumina decides to exploit its elements with terrible acting and a terrible soundtrack. But yes, the film looks good, and when the creatures show up, the pace is taken up a notch. Lumina is a decent experience, when it doesn’t try to be something it’s not, and that’s more than half the film.
With a running time of almost 120 minutes, Lumina has enough false endings to make you grab the remote a few times. When it decides to finally end, you’ll have a few more questions than you had at first, but writer/director Gino McKoy decides a gorgeous Western-like shot is enough to end the film. With a few cuts, his movie would have worked a bit more towards the satisfaction of sci-fi hounds who don’t need a complicated movie to recognize the rules of the genre.
Lumina feels like a compilation of several movies merged into one diverse collection of genre tropes and ideas. There’s no reason why some characters show up and vanish in a matter of minutes, which ultimately feels like filling in a movie that doesn’t need it. If you thought Lumina was about alien abduction, I can assure you it’s about a whole lot more. And while some of those concepts are terribly executed, there’s more to Lumina than the general reception by critics who panned it upon release. There’s an idea here; you just have to dig and find it amid questionable filmmaking.
Film critic. Lover of all things horror. Member of the OFCS. RT Approved Critic.
