Uncontained

A surprisingly ok, watchable post-zombie-apocalypse flick about a tough-as-nails drifter stumbling onto a remote house in Alaska where the precocious young children of a government research wait for their gorgeous, tough-as-nails parents to return while zombies roam the landscape. Other gorgeous and/or tough-as-nails survivors occasionally pass through along the way.

This one was a little different, though, and just slightly better than that intro probably does justice too. It's not really cliched, outside of that, well, it *is* a zombie movie, so certain things are to be expected. It's a little light on character, too, but it's well-made enough, reasonably cinematically polished, and has something of an actual plot rather than just thrills upon thrills, and I can only assume the abysmal reviews on IMDB are mostly from blood-and-guts or fright fans disappointed because it's not really a horror movie. It's sometimes easy to forget, but we do live in a world where people somehow don't like "The Babadook".

There's no scares here, and for the first maybe 2/3 of it there's hardly action at all. But it did have some slightly new ideas to bring to the post-"28 Days Later" zombie film trope of "the infected", which are played pretty well as it moves along, and sort of slight traces of that "survival adventure movie" thing that I usually kinda go for, where it's more quiet and about a situation than about action.

Towards the end it veers just momentarily into the kind of mayhem and violence that a lot of movies spend way too much of their runtime on, but it spends most of its length as if someone actually understood that he-man actors threatening each other and battling it out, by itself, is not entertainment.

And the writer/director/lead actor—one guy did it all, usually a sign of a movie far worse than this—is more of a likeable onscreen presence than I find most the "strong, silent type" tough-as-nails he-man actors to be. When he grits his teeth and fixes his eyes on the horizon and delivers lines like, "I have to go... I made a promise I have to keep", he actually kind of pulls it off, without making me roll my eyes.

Actually, the more I think about it, the more I like it in concept, as really, on consideration, it did actually have a whole lot of overused tropes in it—but it wasn't as obvious, because it wasn't clumsy about them, like so many movies are, and at least used them to try to tell a story, and one I haven't heard a million times before

It's not great, for sure, and probably not even worth going out of your way to see, but, far from the worst way I've spent an hour and a half in front of Tubi lately. I liked it enough that I could see being interested in watching it again someday.