Color Out of Space is one of those movies that I’ve been meaning to watch for quite some time. It’s based on a short story by H.P. Lovecraft and it has Nicolas Cage—two very good reasons for me to be curious, at the very least. Stories adopted from a Lovecraft tale tend to be hit or miss, just as Nicolas Cage movies tend to be hit and miss in terms of how much of the Cage-power he’s allowed to unleash on camera. So either, Color Out of Space was going to be a dull disaster, or an insane adventure.

Image: **SpectreVision \ ACE Pictures Entertainment**

Pros

Nicolas Cage puts a little of his signature performance style on display
Makeup and special effects are good and creepy
Decent acting from the younger cast
Lighting plays a big part in the film in a good way
Mostly faithful to the original story

Cons

You see too much of whatever is in the well
Takes some time to get going
Some dumb character choices

Plot & Thoughts

Nathan Gardner (Nicolas Cage) is the humble patriarch of his family who is attempting to run a farm in a rural section of the United States east coast region near a fictional region of Arkham, Massachusetts. He has some alpacas and a few tomato plants with his three children to help him out, but he still seems to be struggling to be a farmer as much as he struggles to cook food for his family. His wife, Theresa (Joely Richardson), is the primary breadwinner who has to conduct meetings over Skype calls. Theresa has only recently been able to get back home to work having had a recent operation. During a night of reuniting coitus between Nathan and Theresa, a meteorite from the sky crashes onto their farm. The meteorite brings with it something sinister that begins to alter the landscape around them, infect their drinking water, and flash brightly with a color not of this earth.

Despite Color Out of Space originally being written by H.P. Lovecraft about a century ago, this modern interpretation of the story works surprisingly well. The characters of the original story were meant to be a less educated and capable, but the overall scenario remains the same. A meteorite crashes on a farm and the family slowly goes through changes (or just insane) from the alien force that seems to infect the land. The same happens here with some even more horrific events occurring involving the alpacas and certain members of the family.

While it can take a while for the movie to get going, it never loses your interest as various hints at how the land and its inhabitants are changing help keep things creepy. For example: Nathan notices some new wild plants, the youngest son, Jack (Julian Hilliard), does a good job at playing the creepy kid who talks to ‘someone’ in the well, and Theresa seems to go through various trances. The main reason this movie works better than something like Annihilation—which took many of its ideas from the same story—is that the characters are likable and relatable. The Gardners seem like a regular middle-class family who happened to be at the epicenter of something terrible and you want them to survive. When the big event happens in the beginning of the third act involving Theresa and Jack, you definitely feel some sympathy towards all of them, while also getting to enjoy some good practical effects.

Where the movie struggles is mostly in its pacing and the intelligence of certain characters. The fact that the family in the original story was impoverished and uneducated allowed for the suspension of disbelief that a family would be unable to afford abandoning their farm, or just not notice the changes that were happening until they were too late. Here, the daughter Lavinia (Madeleine Arthur) is very quickly aware that something is wrong and mentions several times to the rest of her family that they need to leave. In a modern setting with an educated, middle-class family, you expect the characters to be a bit more resourceful and less oblivious to the danger. The movie doesn’t make much of an effort to demonstrate why Lavinia and her siblings don’t just leave, so you just have to accept that maybe the evil color has an effect on everyone’s minds that makes them unable to leave. Regardless, these flaws are not enough to ruin the experience. As slow as the movie’s pace is, it sill manages to be far more entertaining than its counterpart, Annihilation.

TL;DR

Overall, Color Out of Space manages to do a lot right and succeed in bringing a classic Lovecraft story to life. It has some cool moments that remind me of John Carpenter’s The Thing, which is always good. It also has Nicolas Cage doing some of his signature Cage-crazy style of acting, which always boosts the watchability of a movie for me—it’s somewhere in the range of between The Rock and Ghost Rider: Spirit of Vengeance in Cage intensity. Despite all this, I don’t feel a desire to watch it again. Not enough creepy or cool stuff happens to really make me want to go back, and the characters, while relatable and compelling in their own way, aren’t enough to warrant a second viewing.

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