wenty-two years ago, Professor Hudgens (Walker) took 20 orphans and subjected them to bizarre and unprecedented experiments in the hopes of saving the human race. Basing his research on material culled from archaeological digs for an ancient tribe called the Abskani, Hudgens succeeds and hides his work from everyone—including the government that funded it. As his experiments come to a close, one of the orphans, named Edward Carnby (Slater), escapes and makes off into the wild to live free from Hudgens' controlling influence.
Now fully grown, Carnby dedicates his life to exploring paranormal activity across the globe. Once a member of the secret government unit Bureau 713, he has become a one-man agency and finds that his latest discovery, a small ring-shaped artifact, may hold the key to a recent increase in paranormal activity around the world. Reuniting with his estranged archaeologist girlfriend, Aline Cedrac (Reid), Carnby begins to search for answers and hopefully save the world.
What he soon discovers is that Bureau 713, led by Agent Richard Burke (Dorff), is similarly aware of the recent surge in activity and determined to find the same solution he now frantically searches for. Reluctantly joining with Burke, Carnby begins to unravel the web of mystery that surrounds his artifact, Professor Hudgens and even himself. As more and more evidence of a connection appears between his own past and that of Bureau 713, Carnby must decide whether to help save his friends—and possibly the entire human race—or abandon them to uncover the long-hidden truths for which he's been searching all of his life.
Shown up by Showgirls
Alone in the Dark is not a film for the faint of heart, nor the faint of patience. It's hard to imagine that movies like this even exist anymore; one would have thought that top-heavy cliches, sub-Bruckheimer, five-o'clock-shadow heroism and deafeningly loud sound design went out with the Reagan administration. But there's something about it—and something definitely unintentional—that cannot be denied; regardless of how little of it can be understood, Uwe Boll assembles those familiar parts and creates something laughable from them. If only the film were a comedy.
For the record, it's never good when the audience starts laughing as soon as the movie begins—and nothing has happened. The opening sequence is an interminable text scroll explaining the background of the story; the purpose for this has yet to be determined, since the rest of the film's dialogue is filled with expository speeches justifying, defending, even recanting events that take place on screen. Then, as the film takes off into its labyrinth of Alien-meets-Raiders of the Lost Ark cliches, the laughs continue, because even with so much obviousness being cast on the screen, little of the overall picture makes sense. What do mutated orphans have to do with this ancient Abskani tribe, and what do either of them have to do with these monstrous, computer-generated creatures that are the real enemy of the human characters? We never find out, but we don't stop laughing; there's still much left yet to sift through before the whole affair is over.
Ironically, the audience never really does stop laughing, because the mediocrity, if nothing else, is at least consistent, and its detours into improbability, if not complete implausibility, hardly seem to matter after a while. Alone on the Dark doesn't tread into Showgirls' so-bad-it's-good territory; it surpasses good and goes all the way back to bad again. The effects, while substandard for mainstream movies, are less problematic than the plot; we hardly have time to wonder why these ancient predators can't catch two injured humans because we have yet to discern why they exist at all. Ultimately, it's understandable why Alone in the Dark was made—video-game adaptations are almost as hot as comic-book adaptations right now—but that doesn't mean that for every game there's a movie that can be made well.
