Entertainment

Amazing R-Rated Sci-Fi Comedy Is The Office Meets Close Encounters

By Robert Scucci
| Published 16 seconds ago

Corporate, white-collar jobs are the worst. One time, I worked with a guy who “didn’t like to sit with his back to the door” in the conference room during our weekly management meetings, as if he was Jason freakin Bourne. He was an accounts receivable manager, an avid watch and stamp collector, and weighed north of 300 pounds. Not a single person thought, “man, what a badass” when he said these things, but we just had to grin and bear it. We just smiled and nodded as if he didn’t just say the dumbest thing on the planet.

The same kind of behavior shows up in 2010’s Drones, except nobody’s pretending to be a highly trained assassin posing as a white-collar client services supervisor who drives a Honda Pilot. No, they’re claiming to be aliens.

A Not-So-Hostile Takeover

Drones centers on a business-casual G man named Brian (Jonathan M. Woodward), who works as a pencil pusher for the Omni Link company. It’s never really established what he or his coworkers do for a living. Think of it like Office Space. The greatest source of stress around the office is the company changing its filing system from chronological to alphabetical, which completely incenses Cooperman (Dave Allen), the most cynical employee in the building.

But if I’m weighing in here and being entirely honest, if you don’t sort by “date modified,” you’re a total psychopath. That way, the things you were working on most recently, and actually need, are at the top of the list. I’m totally Team Cooperman here.

There are two other sources of stress in Drones that slowly reveal themselves. First, Brian’s coworker Clark (Samm Levine) accidentally lets it slip that he’s an alien with plans for Earth that haven’t been fully explained. Second, before confessing any of that, Clark encourages Brian to ask out Amy (Angela Bettis), because it’s obvious to everybody that they’ve got some chemistry.

Then, Brian gets to know Amy and learns that she’s also an alien, reporting back to her home planet through the fax machine in the print room. Here’s the real problem. Amy and Clark aren’t from the same planet, and they both plan to take over Earth against each other’s knowledge. What follows is a series of closed-door conversations, eavesdropping, and awkward office romances tangled up in something much bigger than getting accused of stealing the last doughnut from the break room.

Quirky And Fun, But You Have To Use Your Imagination

Like most low-budget outings, Drones has its fun by never showing you its “monsters.” There are no special effects, and the entire movie takes place inside an office building. Everything is fluorescently lit to the point where your brain practically invents that awful humming noise just to complete the experience. Most of the tension comes from miscommunication and people getting their wires crossed over their motives.

What really sells the premise, though, is Amy’s dynamic with Brian. It’s the perfect interoffice romance because it’s built on paranoia. The kind of paranoia you get when you catch feelings for a coworker and convince yourself that even the smallest amount of happiness will somehow get reported to HR and shut down immediately.

Angela Bettis knocks it out of the park as Amy because she carries a subtle uncanny valley vibe. It’s not that she looks strange. She’s conventionally attractive and not doing anything overtly off-putting aside from occasionally talking to a fax machine. It’s all in her expressions. She studies everyone around her like she’s trying to figure out how humans operate in real time so she can report back to her own species.

Samm Levine’s Clark is similarly, and inexplicably, strange. Having worked in an office myself for years, nothing he’s doing is technically out of the ordinary, but something about his mannerisms still feels off. Both characters ride that line perfectly, where they seem normal on the surface but just weird enough to make you question everything.

Stuck between two potential alien invasions, all centered around his workplace, Brian is either weirdly okay with everything or completely bewildered depending on the moment, which makes for a surprisingly fun watch.

Drones is the kind of movie you throw on after a long day at an office job as a reminder to seek employment elsewhere. Everything from the interpersonal politics to the drab setting feels intentionally uncomfortable.

It makes you wonder if humans were ever meant to sit in cubicles all day (Peter Gibbons was right). An office suite is the perfect place for alien overlords to gather and talk shop if you think about it. It’s the one place where humans show up completely disengaged, which probably gives the aliens the upper hand before lunchtime most days.