Useless Humans, another sci-fi offering from the CineJoy film festival, has a lot to owe Edgar Wright for the quarter life crisis burnouts meeting for a night of drinking before discovering that aliens have infiltrated the Earth. The debauchery doesn’t have a lot of consequence. It’s not a commentary on modern vices or even much of an update to World’s End, where the audience is meant to watch a man slowly self-implode over the course of a movie.
For a monster movie, the characters are surprisingly one-note, despite their diversity and the interesting paths we could have traveled down to reflect the richness of the cast. In part, when there’s only seventy minutes of script to play with, there isn’t much development that’s going to happen beyond the half-hearted love story that’s pursued.
There are still some gems in the rough: “optometry is a noble profession” springs to mind, as does some of the comic fight scenes, and the small twist on the theme of dickish boyfriend, extended into a full-blown argument about the morality of dick pics.
