Expulsion

Honestly, this whole idea of multiple dimensions makes my head spin…a lot. To this day, I can’t read another Fantastic Four comic and then the recent Secret Wars. Comic books aside, it’s an idea worth exploring in film…and explore we will in Aaron Jackson and Sean C. Stephens’ Expulsion.

Scott (Colton Tapp) is a brilliant, yet impatient, scientist for the Cicero Market Technologies Corporation. With access to a plethora of medical, environmental, and physics research, Scott and his buddy Vincent (Aaron Jackson) have decided to mess around with particle collision advancements…at Scott’s home. One night, Scott creates a portal to another dimension. Still, before you know it, the experiment goes kablooey, and Vincent is upset that Scott decided to go rogue without him.

As Scott and Vincent’s research progresses, sinister forces lurk nearby with particular interest and deadly resolve. Before you know it, the two have indeed created a stable portal to another dimension, opening a veritable Pandora’s box of unintended events, including the arrival of another Scott, whose been working on dimensional travel himself.

Expulsion is a low-budget independent sci-fi thriller, which means the quality of special effects and acting are not entirely on par with studio offering. It also means here at Film Threat, who the hell cares. To me, Expulsion is a fun, thrill ride by passionate filmmakers, and its shortcomings are easily overlooked as this science experiment asks more questions than it dares to answer.

“…created a stable portal to another dimension, opening a veritable Pandora’s box of unintended events…”

As the science-fiction goes, Jackson and Stephens go to great lengths to explore interdimensional travel’s ideas and ramifications on personal, global, and dimensional levels. If there are infinite versions of you and you run into one, just how much can you trust your other self? Or is it you who can’t be trusted? My greatest apprehension about dimensional travel is getting stuck in the wrong dimension…or worse, screwing around in the wrong one, and the filmmakers play on this extensively.

The film is also a thriller, and there’s a corporate power play occurring in the B-story. As the plot unravels, we have these killers dressed in black, like ninjas, hunting down key players in the story, but whose side of humanity are they on or which reality to they belong? There’s also the evil Cicero corporation that knows more about Scott’s research than their letting on. Soon, Scott and gang are forced to make some tough choices to save his reality and others.

Expulsion shows we don’t have to leave science-fiction to the big studios. Off-the-shelf effects are much more sophisticated these days, and elaborate space station sets are not needed to tell a story that spans beyond our current reality. To make sci-fi work is the establishment of the rules of the game. For example, when two versions of the same person can exist in the same dimension, once it closes, the die is cast, and one must die a gruesome and torturous death.

If you like science fiction, you’re going to have a good time with Expulsion. Quite frankly, it would make an excellent primer for anyone who thinks sci-fi is only Star Wars and Star Trek. Again, once you get past its low-budget limitations, you’re going to have fun. It’s smart, and the build to the end, when the gimmick spins wildly out of control, makes for a fascinating payoff.