Tem’s Aussie Occupation undesirable
Occupation (M, 119 mins) Directed by Luke Sparke ★★
Nope. I never saw it coming either. Some gallah has restaged Independence Day in rural Australia. And in the week or two before it turns up in the DVD sale bin at The Warehouse, Occupation is playing on a biggish screen near you. So where the bloody hell are ya’?
Actually, to be fair, Occupation kicks off with a fair bit of promise. Providing you don’t pause too long to wonder why an army of intergalactic invaders in spaceships would want to attack a small town game of Friday night footy, then you’ll have to admit the opening scenes are pretty competently staged.
We meet our core cast – including Temuera Morrison as Peter, newly released from prison and presumably about to be deported back to Aotearoa – as they pull up to the oval and start to lay out which particular stereotype they’ll be essaying.
There’s the angsty young hunk and his newly pregnant girlfriend. She’s a nurse, naturally. In the next ute over is angsty hunk’s ex-best mate with whom he’s had some illdefined falling out. And then there’s the small-town radio DJ with the ill-advised moustache and ‘‘comic relief’’ more or less tattooed across his forehead.
Sundry other Home and Away refugees make up the numbers. Tem’s role is to be the family bloke with the wife, step-kids and a housebus that’s exactly the right size to carry the cast as they flee the attack and then hare across the country while re-inventing themselves as a resistance force fighting back against the alien invaders. And it’s here that the wheels fall off Occupation, fast.
Like I said, the opening stanza of spaceships swooping into town like fruitbats in a Queensland sunset, and a horde of armoured alien soldiers advancing through the sugar cane fields to shoot or imprison the local blokes and sheilas is all very well.
As long as you don’t allow yourself to wonder why the aliens would even bother, then Occupation kind of looks like it might deliver on its slender promise. But about 20 minutes in it all goes a bit yeah, nah.
The film seems to leap forward in time by months, although a tranche of needlessly expository dialogue tells us only a few days have passed. Our heroes are bunked up in a deserted house and looking pretty settled, when out of the trees comes another platoon of blaster shootin’ nasties. The housebus hits the road, and the sequence repeats in a different location. And then again. Until some spurious juncture is reached and our posse decide to launch a decidedly suicidal attack on a nearby factory where the aliens – we are told – have set up some sort of branch office. By this time a couple of Land Rovers of soldiers have turned up and announced that they are ‘‘The Australian Army’’.
Occupation is a film of bits that just don’t fit together. If I had to guess, I’d be wondering whether it wasn’t intended to be a three or four-episode TV mini-series, and this two-hour film is somebody’s attempt at a salvage job. Nothing else really explains the chronology that jumps around like a ’roo on asphalt on a summer day.
Some of the individual moments are pretty watchable, but the connective tissue is either nonsensical or missing completely. Where I should have been engrossed, I was mostly hooting with laughter.
Occupation is what happens when film-makers start to think that action and special-effects are the reason a film exists, and forget that all the action in the world gets boring, fast, if the story doesn’t hang together and the characters are never allowed to be more than cliches spouting exposition.
I’ve got a soft-spot you could lose your boot in for Independence Day and it’s risible sequel. But watching our cousins over the ditch trying to do a rural re-make just veers from painful to unintentionally hilarious.
Apparently there’s a sequel in the works already. While we wait for that, I’ll be digging out my DVD of Peter Jackson’s Bad Taste and reminding myself just how much fun a low-budget alien-invasion movie should be.
And one thing more. Occupation was shot in and around the town of Murwillumbah, just south of the Queensland border in New South Wales.
The Kalibal tribe were the original people of the area. Early in the 20th century the Kalibal were still numerous in the region. But within a couple of decades the tribe had vanished, either killed or driven away by an actual alien occupying force. Occupation never mentions or draws on their story. The irony is almost heartbreaking.
Temuera Morrison is Peter, newly released from prison and presumably about to be deported back to Aotearoa.