Crew
Director – William Kaufman, Screenplay – William Kaufman & Paul Reichelt, Producers – Andrew Lewis, Isaac Lewis, Christian Sosa & Jan Wroblewski, Photography – Mark Rutledge, Music – John Roome, Visual Effects – Burning Tractor (Supervisor – Wes Meyers), Special Effects Supervisor – David Nami, Creature Effects Supervisor – Todd Masters, Makeup Effects – Remi Savva, Production Design – Paul Alix. Production Company – Appalachian Film/Roosevelt Film Lab/Burning Tractor Productions/Denton Film/XYZ Films/Irish Channel Studios.
Cast
Max Martini (Sergeant Michael Kelly), Brianna Hildebrand (Ravi Mitov), Linda Hamilton (Anya Mitov), Michael Irby (Reyes), LaMonica Garrett (Rhodie), Linds Edwards (Nash), Jaren Mitchell (Jax), Dave Gibbons (Gibbs), Tyler Galpin (Donnie)
Plot
Sergeant Michael Kelly leads a Special Forces team who are in the midst of furious firefight when a UFO appears overhead. Kelly and his men come around inside a facility. They find their weapons and break out into the corridors. After encountering another girl survivor Ravi and her mother Anya, a Russian soldier, they realise they are on an alien ship. Making an escape requires going into combat against the aliens in a massive armed battle.
Osiris was the twelfth film as director for William Kaufman. Elsewhere, Kaufman has specialised in crime and military films with the likes of The Prodigy (2005), Sinners and Saints (2010), The Hit List (2010), One in the Chamber (2012), The Marine 4: Moving Target (2015), Jarhead 3: The Siege (2016), Lazarat (2019), The Channel (2023), Shrapnel (2023) and Warhorse One (2023), all non-genre works. His one other genre entry was Daylight’s End (2016) set during an apocalyptic siege.
Osiris starts promisingly with a tour of the Solar System following the Voyager probes as it heads into the outer reaches. There are some not too bad visual effects here. This starts things promisingly but that comes crashing down moments later when we are abruptly thrown into the midst of eight minutes worth of soldiers shooting furiously in the middle of a combat zone. We are given no clues as to who the soldiers are, where they are, what side they are on or who they are fighting against – just this massive outlay of artillery fire that drags on for several minutes. It is hard to think of any film that can go from a promising opening and takes a nosedive so abruptly the next scene in.
The set-up of people exploring an alien ship is another one of great promise. It is also one that the film has zero interest in and instead spends the entire rest of the show, bar occasional pauses to deliver dialogue, with more non-stop artillery fire and action. You really want there to be more to the film but there is nothing else to it beyond endless shooting up as the soldiers run down a series of standard spaceship corridor sets or between storage containers. It is a film that has been assembled by someone where it feels that their entire film school education has been formed by multiple back-to-back viewings of Aliens (1986) and Predator (1987) and a desire to emulate these in the most direct way possible.
There is the minor blip of an appearance from Linda Hamilton, looking a lot older than she is, as a Russian soldier who has also been abducted. (It is not ever made clear how she has been there for thirty years and who the father of daughter Brianna Hildebrand would have been). The other minor moment of interest is the twist that comes at the end [PLOT SPOILERS] where Max Martini emerges from the alien ship to discover that he is on Earth and can see the ruins of the Eiffel Tower in the background. It is clearly the film hoping for another Planet of the Apes (1968) ending but it ends in confusion that leaves more questions than it answers – how come they are on a devastated Earth? What happened when they were abducted by the ship at the start – did it simply just land in France? How long have they been unconscious? Why the heck do the aliens leave them alive and with all their guns and ammo intact? It should also be pointed out that never anywhere throughout is the significance of the title ‘Osiris’ – the name of the Ancient Egyptian god of the underworld – made clear.
Trailer here