Collider

It's 2018, and the world is all post-apocalyptic-y. Five people wake up in the Cern Campus in Switzerland, all having being pulled there from the recent past, with no idea where they are, when it is, or how they got there. There's a shady girl from London, an LA cop with a heart of gold, an Irish mother grieving over her missing daughter, a physically fit lady from Brazil, and a Spanish douchebag who is surely going to be the first to die. They bump into a Scottish scientist who was working on the Large Hadron Collider, used it to jump forward in time, and discovered that a massive meteor had hit the Earth, killed pretty much everyone, and now there are monsters for some reason. So all six have to work together to find some spark plugs (yes, really) to turn the LHC back on, so they can all go back in time and live happily ever after again.

There have been a number of low-budget sci-fi hits over the years - Cube, Primer, Timecrimes - and while it's great to see Irish cinema branch out in a new direction, Collider fails on almost every conceivable level. Those movies soared by putting front and centre their intelligence and unique ideas, which are two things definitely missing from this movie. It's difficult to tell if it's the fault of the shockingly woeful script, or merely if the actors were badly directed, but each and every character in this movie is painfully underwritten and overperformed, with their story arcs and the order they're going to die in almost immediately apparent.

The "Cern Campus" looks like an abandoned hotel, a few dimly lit hallways and a secondary school science-lab. The creatures chasing them are kept at bay with sources of light (a la low-budget sci-fi hit Pitch Black), but what they are, why they're afraid of light and why they're hungry for flesh is never explained. In fact, nothing is ever explained. When the world is revealed to be pretty much irredeemably destroyed, these survivors react like someone just told them the next bus is going to be ten minutes late.

There is a certain level of defence put up for movies like this, almost as if we should be impressed by what they've achieved with such a shoe-string budget. But sometimes that money would've just been better spent on making shoe-strings.