‘Lumina’ review: Come for the aliens, skip the love triangle

Incompetent and occasionally baffling, Lumina is lost in the space between paper-thin characters and weak genre mixing.

Lumina may be a labor of love for writer/director Gino McKoy. He, the production team and his cast were determined to make this feature come to life despite numerous obstacles. Those include COVID-19, a brush with death for one producer, and controversies involving McKoy’s parents, who are also producers. Unfortunately, McKoy’s friends and family will be the only ones who will enjoy the film.

Lumina revolves around a carefree group of pals. Alex (Rupert Lazarus) is a trust fund baby paying for the revelry. Patricia (Sidney Nicole Rogers), his vaping friend, loves to film everything on her cell phone. Delilah (Andrea Tivadar), Alex’s ex, is waiting for him to tire of Tatiana (Eleanor Williams), Alex’s latest and most serious girlfriend, so Delilah can jump back into his rotation. When Tatiana disappears after a party, all the eyewitnesses believe that extraterrestrials are responsible. With the authorities doing nothing, Alex turns to his conspiracy theory loving friend, George (Ken Lawson) to help him and the remaining four go on a road trip to find Tatiana. 

With friends like these…

The first cardinal sin of Lumina is fridging the new girlfriend to make the protagonist more interesting instead of writing a compelling character. Said protagonist, Alex, is so mid that the only explanation for him having friends is his cash supply. Even his fashion is confusing: he wears corporate casual to a house party, then an unzipped black hoodie with no shirt to convey his desperation and lost opportunity to sleep with his hot girlfriend. Shame that said girlfriend is desperately in love with him for inexplicable reasons and correctly feels that Delilah is a threat. And then there’s his fake, bushy facial hair that Sir Anthony Hopkins couldn’t act through. The beard tries to convey his grief and desperation before being swapped for a crewcut and five o’clock shadow showing he means business and is getting tough. Dude, just hire some Blackwater outfit if you have the money. 

The movie’s second cardinal sin is feeling like a throwback to a problematic way of crafting a story with poor depictions of women and people of color. Everyone loves Black best friend Patricia for not being a rival for Alex’s attention despite living with him. When the other Black character, George, gets introduced, she’s hostile until it’s time for them to start showing interest in each other. Why? Because neither has a love interest and no one can be single for long in Lumina. It’s an 80s cliche when the Black characters could only date each other, and people who are openly hostile to each other are actually pining for their affection. Even though the women outnumber the men, the film fails the Bechdel test because they cannot stop talking about Alex. Everyone exists to support and cheer him without ever rising to any level of investments.

McKoy does not seem to understand how human beings react. Though they’re supposedly in love, Alex doesn’t mind that Tatiana was keeping a ton of secrets from him. When Delilah and Patricia enter a store, an old woman sitting at a desk starts cackling. It feels like a non sequitur to create a disturbing moment. They remark on the weirdness for a beat, then start joking about it before fighting at the drop of a hat. It’s the illusion of creating a spooky atmosphere for presenting a prose dump that explains everything that preceded in case the audience gets lost in the plot. The scene also offers another opportunity to talk about whom Alex will choose. The only moment not devoted to Alex is when Oscar-nominee Eric Roberts shows up for a baffling cameo (one of his near-fifty other projects this year).

First-timer flaws.

Lumina’s third cardinal sin is its unintelligible story in desperate need of a rewrite. It suffers from the typical first-time film flaw: wanting to do too much, too soon. McKoy also serves as co-composer of the score, forcing the ensemble to act as if they are jamming to the Billboard Hot 100. Perhaps McKoy should solicit feedback from people less personally invested in the film before filming next time. Being so protective of his work makes him blind to how easily the average moviegoer can read between the lines.

McKoy doesn’t establish enough groundwork at the beginning of the movie, and necessary details are provided too late in the story. Why do Tatiana’s parents live in Morocco? Doesn’t matter. By the time McKoy reveals the movie’s alien mythology and ties it to Tatiana, it feels more like a Frankenstein pastiche of popular culture media about aliens, like The X-Files or Men in Black. Is it a government conspiracy and/or aliens? Doesn’t matter. The end becomes a slog towards a roughshod, ambiguous, unsatisfying resolution with awkward, action-filled denouement. The aliens only provide a veneer to determine whether Alex will give the rose to Tatiana or Delilah. McKoy is a true believer in alien abductions, so it feels like another metaphorical blow that he doesn’t have a more cohesive backstory about the aliens’ motivations and aspirations. They are as two-dimensional as the people that they terrorize.

It wouldn’t be fair to slam the acting chops of the cast. The original cast left, and SAG-AFTRA did not bless the production. The women do a better job at faking camaraderie than the guys, but it all feels a little forced and uneven. Rogers sets the emotional tone of every scene and does the heavy lifting, but some of the choices are inscrutable. Before Delilah returns from a spat with Alex, Rogers steels herself in front of a mirror as if she’s getting ready to impress a crush. Blame the direction? Lawson sticks to type as comic relief without the laughs, except for when he rides a donkey or makes a curry goat zimger. That ties in nicely to the best scene in the movie, an amusing, nonsensical post-credits scene that felt like a riff on the shawarma scene from The Avengers. 

Visually Lumina is only as good as its locations. The LA house is gorgeous, and the desert scenes evoke Martian terrain. The best sci-fi shots are of the spaceships in the open air, but the interior shots are embarrassingly amateur. There’s better green screen work in YouTube essays, or even the original Clash of the Titans if the director was using VFX for the very first time. The aliens are more like roaring beasts, straining disbelief that they would have the capacity to create advanced technology. While filmmakers without a lot of funding usually receive some grace, they still have to make something with true potential. Lumina is not that kind of movie even if graded on a curve.

The bottom line.

Sometimes a bad movie is so bad it’s good, and other times, there is a kernel of a good movie in the mess, but Lumina is neither. The romantic plot overshadows the sci-fi elements instead of complimenting them, and emotional investment is impossible for such unmemorable characters. In the abstract, it is easy to root for an upstart filmmaker, but after watching the flick, this is not a case of an underdog achieving his vision, a diamond in the rough. It’s just rough, and the cheering will stop once you realize that the movie is never going to get better. 

Lumina is now playing in select theaters. You can watch the trailer here.

Images courtesy of Goldove Entertainment. You can read more reviews by Sarah G. Vincent here.