Arcadian’s shocking aliens can’t fix its criminal Nicolas Cage shortage

polygon.com:

Inside all of us are two wolves. This is true for everyone except Nicolas Cage. Inside Nicolas Cage are two Nicolas Cages: the somber, dialed-down Nic Cage of Pig and Leaving Las Vegas, and the screaming, manic Nic Cage of Vampire’s Kiss, The Wicker Man, and Mom and Dad. Which one wins? The one he decides fits a given role, sometimes regardless of the movie around him. (I will never stop wondering why calm, internal, straight-faced Nicolas Cage showed up for the otherwise nutballs supernatural action movie Drive Angry.)

In Benjamin Brewer’s small-scale alien-apocalypse movie Arcadian, quiet grown-up Nic Cage once again turns up for a movie that could have used a little more off-kilter energy. But for once, the movie’s central issue isn’t which Nic Cage came to set, it’s how much he got to come to set. “Nicolas Cage tries to raise teenagers at the end of the world” has potential as a premise, even if it doesn’t sound radically innovative. Arcadian sidelines Cage too often, though, and finds nothing as appealing or energetic to replace him with.

As the movie opens, Cage’s character, Paul, flees a city that’s disintegrating as unseen forces attack. The crisis is suggested mostly with sound cues and striking images of abandoned streets and a smoking skyline. The approach suggests a project on the order of Skyline — a low-budget but high-concept disaster movie with an ambitious visual design raising it above its small-scale origins. Immediately after that, though, Paul retreats to the countryside, where he finds a set of infant twins lying on a small mattress in a junk-filled space. The sequence is so shorthanded that it feels like Brewer and screenwriter Michael Nilon are deliberately obscuring the details for a later big reveal that never comes.

It isn’t clear where Paul is when he finds the babies, how he determines their guardians are gone, or whether he has any relationship to either of the children or the place where he finds them. It’s simplest to guess that he