San Francisco IndieFest 2025 Coverage
Touchdown review
A lockdown movie about a sci-fi invasion that moonlights as confusing political commentary.
Festival reviews will not contain spoilers.
Touchdown
Directed by Josephine Rose
Written by Josephine Rose
Starring Clinton Liberty, Will Attenborough, Cressida Bonas, Kai Luke Brummer, Lily Frazer, Jason Flemyng and Sky Yang
Touchdown Review
The pandemic offered some unique attempts to continue filmmaking through lockdown restrictions. Most of them were instantly forgettable…but few, if any, were as confusing as Touchdown. I’m not talking about the efforts or success at crafting a story within those limitations…Touchdown does that better than most. I’m talking about the story and it’s seeming desire to question the restrictions themselves…and then disproving their complaints with their own narrative. It’s all a bit confounding, to be honest. Leaving Touchdown as an interesting look at production within lockdown that feels like it doesn’t know enough about what it’s trying to say to actually say it.
A meteor shower brings alien life to earth. The world goes on lockdown as they work to eliminate the enemies. A group of friends from across the globe lean on each other to survive an event that…frankly…appears to be done simply by listening to the governments they don’t trust.
The last line of the plot summary probably isn’t what Touchdown intends its message to be…but it’s hard to escape it. The allegory is clear…a film made through lockdown restrictions turning government overreach into a conspiracy theory. A cynical person would see it as a misguided statement about the reality of the Covid pandemic. We’ve seen enough of those conspiracy theories online to recognize them in entertainment. The problem with that line of thinking is that…the aliens are real. They will kill you when you don’t follow the lockdown guidelines.
The other way to interpret it would be as a rebuke of people who questioned the need for a global lockdown in the face of a deadly plague. We see that the antagonists of Touchdown are legitimate threats…we lose people to them when they are defiant about government mandated restrictions. It seems pretty cut and dry. Touchdown never feels like it’s a satire of conspiracy theories. It heroizes standing up to the government…even as you’re being killed by the very thing the lockdown was trying to prevent. Touchdown wants to blame the government as much, if not more than the deadly pandemic. It does this…poorly.
Honestly, the messaging in Touchdown is so muddled by its very real threats…I’m almost resigned to accept it didn’t actually have a purpose. That there was residual anger about lockdown restrictions despite acknowledging the things they were attempting to prevent were, in fact, a deadly threat. I’m not sure what else to take away from a story that is consistently angry at the government for trying to protect people from something that does kill them. But…I’ve thought that for almost exactly five years in real life too.
The production of Touchdown, on the other hand, is something cool. Its actors are stationed all around the world. From Los Angeles to India, the UK to China, South Africa to Thailand…Touchdown connects its characters through a global emergency. That aspect of the story and its parallel to the Covid pandemic is perfect. It uses drone shots of empty streets to accurately convey the feeling of the world outside. Whenever someone does step outside the safety of their mandated lockdown…the world feels as empty and detached as it did in 2020. Effortlessly ominous and equally dangerous.
The performances are pretty strong given how awkward they must have been to give. Actors are alone on screen…reacting to what’s on screens in front of them most of the time. Jamie (Clinton Liberty), Emma (Cressida Bonas), Jerry (Will Attenborough), Pete (Kai Luke Brummer) and Chloe (Lily Frazer) comprise our main cast. They attempt to search for information on what’s happening outside through all the media lies and government deceptions. This leads to some fun ideas…again within a strangely misplaced target of anger. The aliens are out there.
George A. Romero took zombie invasions as an opportunity to tell you that our institutions will fail you. Touchdown says that your institutions will suppress you…but also the threat is totally real and not listening will get you killed. It uses the shadow of a deadly real-world pandemic to tell you that. Whatever Touchdown is trying to say is lost in the disconnect of the threat protections were put in place for existing.
Scare Value
As much as it feels like Josephine Rose had a lot of complaints about how the world handled Covid lockdowns…almost every one of them is undone by the movie’s plot. Unless the message was a poorly told fable that we should trust the government…I’m confused how to take complaints and conspiracies about a situation that ended up being 100% true. Ignoring restrictions leads to death. Touchdown takes a strange angle and ends up…mad at the restrictions about it?
