WELCOME TO EARTH

Produced and Edited by Taylor Warren and Michael Mongillo
Directed by Michael Mongillo
Written by James Charbonneau and Michael Mongillo
Directed of Photography - Derek Dudek

Albert - Zeke Rippy
Jack - Jason Alan Smith
Rachael - Jane O'Leary
Pete - Davis Mikaels
Jill - Kate Orsini

WELCOME TO EARTH, Michael Mongillo's follow-up to his powerful independent thriller, THE WIND, appears, on the surface, to be a complete 180-degree about-face from his previous film, but is in actuality a continuation of the themes Mongillo explored in his nuanced first feature.

The settings are still the same, suburban middle America where Joe and Jane Average eke out their humdrum existence. As with THE WIND, Mongillo again uses a genre convention as an excuse to delve into personal relationships as they crumble. In THE WIND, a metaphorical breeze would bring man's darker emotions to the surface and thus destroy years of friendship and love. In WELCOME TO EARTH, aliens are making themselves known to mankind and everyone needs to put their affairs in order because the world as we know it ends tonight.

Fortunately, Mongillo leaves the utter bleakness of THE WIND behind and brings a sense of hope to his new film. Where THE WIND was concerned with the mistakes people make and following those missteps through to their dire conclusions, WELCOME TO EARTH is about correcting one's mistakes and getting one's life back on track because tomorrow is the start of a completely new world, a completely new existence.

The characters in WELCOME TO EARTH all radiate varying levels of despair as they deal with their personal issues. Albert, divorced two years, can't move on from his ex-wife. Self-loathing and belligerent, Albert decides to use the cover of Jack's "Welcome to Earth" party to introduce the new "Al." Sober, he's sworn off pot and liquor and promises to speak his mind at every opportunity.

Rachael, Jack's wife, feels ignored by her husband and has a nonexistent relationship with her mother. Suffering from sibling rivalry and low self-esteem, Rachael's anger and jealousy festers in a cesspool of insecurity. She longs for a relationship where she has an equal footing.

Jill, Rachael's sister, has a growing fascination with Albert, the problem is that she just found out she's pregnant with longtime boyfriend Peter's child. Fearing that Peter really isn't the marrying kind, Rachael wrestles with the notions of abortion and single motherhood.

Peter is just like his name, a little prick. Little more than a façade of success, Peter wears a smug, sarcastic attitude as a substitution for depth or intelligent thought. As Albert puts it, Peter once possessed a sense of irony with humor, now he's lost even that aspect of his true identity.

Finally, there's the single-minded Jack, who bears a strong resemblance to J.D. Fortune, the new singer of INXS. Jack fixates so much on what tomorrow means that he forgets about what he has at home and never sees Rachael's pain. Despite his obsession, Jack is the most well adjusted person of the bunch.

Like so many independent productions from the 1990's, WELCOME TO EARTH is a talking head film where each character's quirks provide the points of conflict. Character is the heart while the meat of the movie is how everyone else deals with those quirks. How would a self-absorbed jerk thinking of cheating on his girlfriend feel about her infatuation with another man? How would a woman, envious of her sister's ability to maintain civility with her mother while facing the possibility of abortion, deal with being the last to know about her sister's pregnancy? How would all these people deal with the blunt fact that their petty trivialities mean nothing in the grand scheme of the universe?

The aliens are a Hitchcockian McGuffin that are of little importance to the actual story. I'd almost have preferred if they weren't involved at all; instead the movie's characters opting for a more traditional reason for gathering. The title itself is metaphorical and easily translates to "Welcome to What it Means to be Human" as Mongillo's movie illustrates the complexities of man's emotional structure. The title and set up come across like some sort of joke hammer that's hit across the head repeatedly until viewers understand the notion that in the vast macrocosm of the universe, Albert, Jack, and friends, comprise a microcosmic planetoid of scant significance only to those that inhabit it.

Given the fantastical nature of the premise, Mongillo far exceeds the expectations of anyone out to earn their indie street cred by delivering a drama comprised of excellent, taut dialog with honest and emotionally draining acting that doesn't contain a single wasted scene. Most films utilizing this sort of extended gather formula, be it the Jennifer Love Hewitt vehicle CAN'T HARDLY WAIT, LOVE! VALOUR! COMPASSION! with Jason Alexander, or the ultimate get-together movie, THE BIG CHILL, there are always scenes that meander and drag, but Mongillo crafts a film that, except for a few music montages, is nearly free of all padding. Not all dangling plot threads are resolved but every character finds their arc in life, or less abstractly, their place in the universe as the trials that lay ahead. In that regard, WELCOME TO EARTH is about as honest a drama as you're likely to see.

Meantime Productions