The Axiom

This is one of horrors that can't simply be said to deserve bad rating, but can't also deserve good one, because there are out there many better horror movies. What makes this good one is mystery, adventure, surprise, and weirdness. There is spiritual, religious, interesting world and dimensions. It's very good to be immersed into such dimensions because that way I was on the lookout for something that prevented me from being bored. But there is lack of explanation, good intro, real life scenarios like more people, animals, police, buildings, events. Everything somehow happened too quickly, in weird way, without good reason and explanation. There is lack of motive for occurrences and for the whole story.

The Axiom started out as an okay B-Movie. The picture quality is very good. The acting is also pretty decent. BUT the comic-relief guy was too much and really annoying. Aside from that small detail, I initially thought this really would turn out to be a decent watch. The intrigue and mystery was well put together. But then everything suddenly turned really cheesy and bad when they finally got to the cabin in the forest. I actually thought the monster makeup was pretty good so that's not the problem. It's just the script altogether is just really, really bad. It seems like they didn't know where to go with their story. It turned into boring nonsense and I stopped being invested in the movie. There is definitely something fishy going on with the ratings on the site. It's a pretty crappy movie with nice visuals, a 3 at best. By the time it ended I was down to a 2, however.

On strictly technical merits, this movie is just fine. Not a masterpiece, but there are better movies with worse directing, cinematography, and editing, so it functions well enough in that sense.

Unfortunately, it suffered from some pretty bad acting, though half the time, I couldn't tell how much of it was a flaw in the actors or a flaw in the writing, specifically the dialogue. The first half of the movie was plagued with terrible dialogue, weird acting choices, and, frankly, nonsensical behavior. The writer/director, Woods, makes the fatal mistake of being too eager to just move the plot along, to the point that it seemed that not a single one of the characters had even the slightest bit of situational awareness. Oddities occur, they do a double-take and move on. Someone says something strange, they do a double-take and move on. The situation seems off, they do a half-take and move on. And you didn't get much of a sense that any of these people even *liked* each other, let alone wanted to spend time with each other. Their interactions ranged from uncomfortable to a sense of sincere sublimated hatred. They seem to take any chance they can get to go off on their own little journeys, either physically or mentally, and seem to be completely unaware that their companions are actual people with personalities. And they work as quickly as possible to drop any potential issues that have been raised. This problem was most prevalent in the first half of the movie; the reason the second half was marginally better was simply because the plot itself started narrowing down their chances to behave irrationally. Not really much redemption there.

Their inexplicable behavior -- especially McKenzie who appears to be a borderline sociopath, sending her friends ahead to in a situation she knew was dangerous just to test it out, tying in to the fact that she knew it was dangerous but wouldn't tell anyone, followed by the fact that she knew her brother was in danger and knew what was happening but made no attempt to walk 5 feet and show him where she was -- ties into the incoherence of the underlying mythology. If you don't want to show all your cards, fine. But show at least a couple of them. The names, including the one the title derived from, seemed to have been invented sheerly because they "sound" interesting. None of it was actually given any foundation. The one -- and I do mean *one* -- concession to backstory was some vague story about what *might* be responsible (avoiding spoilers here), which took approximately 20 seconds of screentime. The rest was just some talk about what people do with the situation now. It's never explained how they derived their survival tactics and tools (why does the one phone work? how does what appears to be tomato soup work when drunk? why does said soup seem to randomly fail (it does so at least twice)? what's the deal with the guest book? how, for that matter, did the character take a half-second glance to know exactly what it was? and, ranging further afield, how does Ms. Temporary Final Girl escape the enemy in her penultimate fight? why was the one girl so insanely impressed by the other girl's ability to gently lower an axe and somehow defeat a lock? why did the brother seem almost upset that he was expected to care about his missing sister? and...I could go on for pages here. Let's just say the backstory and characterizations were criminally neglected.

It was a cool enough concept, which is why I watched in the first place. But I get the feeling that the director/writer didn't know how to build an actual coherent story. The dialogue was something I could have written the entirety of in a single evening and not been remotely taxed to be clever or naturalistic. The concept deserved more conscientious world-building, and more effort in the dialogue writing from Woods.

I'm giving this a 5 because, as noted at the top, it was technically fine, and the monsters, while not particularly scary, were interesting enough due to the basic concept. (The movie relies almost entirely on some form of jump scare. I'm not one of those horror fans who whine about jump-scares in themselves. Jump-scares work, else movie-makers wouldn't keep using them. So they're fine...if you don't rely almost entirely on them. Offer some alternate paths to conveying horror. I mean, the movie even messed up the "creepy roadside building" -- no matter how repelled the characters act or how much they talk about it being creepy, that was simply not a creepy building. It was a rather nice edifice built from stone and mortar. Place like that can fetch a pretty penny in most places.)

I understand the desire to cut small-budget movies a break but a 7.0 rating for this film might be deceptive for someone deciding if they want to commit a couple of hours to it. 'The Axiom' is a decent enough movie but it's inferior in nearly every way to the lower-rated but similar 'The Endless.' The latter film has a better script, better acting (except for Taylor Flowers who's great in this), better cinematography and a more self-assured sense of what kind of movie it is. 'The Axiom' is a combination of cosmic horror and monster movie that has some effective moments mixed in with some barely adequate ones. I'm not saying skip this film, I'm only warning you that it's a bit uneven and not deserving of it's current (early March 2019) 7.0 rating.

Sadly there was room for more and I don't think the budget was the problem but quite possibly the execution and the script. It is not a bad movie yet far from something I would recommend to a fellow horror fan because it doesn't quite deliver, mostly lurks around a good premise without hitting the mark.

The Axiom has some ambition to it, it tries to tie as many ends as possible yet some remain sort of loose, not necessarily in a bad way but certainly not what we would expect out of a better production. So for an indie film, I think it did OK, my problem mostly lies in the fact that it managed to show a pretty good idea but failing to deliver as it should.

Thus all in all it comes down to everyone's opinion and nothing more. You wanna take a chance on it, do so. See how it goes down on you. Maybe don't expect much of it tho.

Cheers!