Want to see a great sci-fi movie with Tom Felton that explores themes of human evolution? That’s what Rise of the Planet of the Apes is for, because Altered sure isn’t.
In its dystopia, citizens can opt for incredible DNA enhancements from the Genesis Institute “laboratry” (as is visible in one shot), like the ability to drink through a straw that unfurls from your nostrils or to check the temp of your dinner steak via a simple gaze of your glowing peepers. These upgrades and more can be yours! Unless you’re one of the unfortunate 10% of the population immune to bio-modifications, that is; derisively dubbed “specials,” you losers are segregated from society.
Being paraplegic, Felton’s Leon is one such special. He and his 12-year-old roomie, Chloe (Liza Bugulova, Disney’s The Last Warrior), luck upon a mechanical suit of Dr. Doomy armor that allows Leon to walk again, plus fight bad guys with kitchenware from a Pampered Chef party, and save a politically minded pop star (Aggy K. Adams, Netflix’s The Witcher) from kidnapping.
As if that weren’t enough, Chloe injects the superhero suit with essence from a smuggled flower that converts nuclear energy into pure energy so Leon also can shoot vines and, ultimately, deadly thorns. Now he’s like Spawn, if created by Guerney’s Seed & Nursery. As Leon quips in the film’s climax, “That’s flower power … that’s flower power,” in case you didn’t get it the first time, I guess.
The science-fiction genre is an ideal medium to explore hot-button issues of today under the guise of a tale of a near-future tomorrow. Yet Altered is all toothless, surface-level junk, as if adapted from a tween activist’s change.org petition. Shot in the glorious nation of Kazakhstan, it sounds dubbed in post, despite an English-speaking main cast. The visuals are so inert and uninvolving, I would not be shocked to learn they were generated with a single prompt of an AI tool.
Writer/director Timo Vuorensola would have been much better off utilizing even a smidge of the satire (however mild) from his Nazi UFO breakthrough, Iron Sky. At least then, lines like Felton’s praise to a wind-up mouse, “Good work, Mr. Stinky,” could be laughed with, rather than at. —Rod Lott