Directed by Emerson Moore
Written by Emerson Moore, Joshua Dobkin, and Sean Wathen
Starring Jordan Claire Robbins, Theo Rossi, Tahirah Sharif, Julian Feder, Elena Juatco, and Shane West
Runtime: 88 minutes
Unrated
In select theaters, digital and on demand May 6

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

People are in a field, they have to escape the field, now GO. If it didn't have anything else going for it, Escape the Field would at least have a nice, direct title in its list of pros (better "Verb the Noun" name than Surviving the Game or Breaking the Waves? You be the judge!). As it is, Escape the Field is a fun sci-fi thriller that never gets ambitious enough to really go over.

Director/co-writer Emerson Moore's last credit is a short film called It Lives Below. He gets to the point with these things. In his feature debut, six semi-amnesiacs wake up in small clearings in an endless cornfield. The first person we meet, Sam (Jordan Claire Robbins) has a gun and a single bullet. The next one, Tyler (Theo Rossi) has a small pack of matches. The set-up seems like Battle Royale or maybe even Predators, but transposed onto In The Tall Grass.

More people show up (items include a knife, a compass and a lantern, all of which are adorned with the same logo). Shane West from A Walk To Remember and The League of Extraordinary Gentlemen pronounces "compass" like "calm-piss."

I'm waiting for a movie like this to really go somewhere with the premise. I've been waiting since Cube. My standards are, admittedly, low- I enjoyed both of the Escape Room films- but I do think this is the right format for the Mysterious Puzzle Gauntlet story. TV can draw things out too far or pay a thread off poorly (Lost), wasting your time, but movies, especially 88-minute-long ones, are in and out. Whatever happens, I get to leave this field behind by the end of the afternoon. All questions the filmmakers want to answer have to be answered by the end of that period of time.

There's always the question of what the filmmakers are trying to say with these things. Reveal too little (or nothing) and the puzzles need to be perfect. A movie like Cube has to come up with good challenges for its victims if there won't be a story to pull the audience forward. Reveal too much and you've got The Hunt, a sharply directed genre film whose political satire is both too dumb and too ingrained in the film to be ignored.

Like any Mysterious Puzzle Gauntlet, there are weird things in the field. Our wandering six come across a wooden fence, a creepy scarecrow, some kind of monster. They mistrust each other, worried one of their group brought the other five into the field, which seems impossible. They're all pretty much the same person, except one is more of an asshole than the others. By the end of the movie, that character has transformed into Martin Sheen in Apocalypse Now. I'm talking around Escape the Field's plot because it's a quick film that takes place almost entirely in what could be five square feet of cornfield. There just isn't much here to discuss if I'm not going to spoil everything. There are things members of the group hide for no reason, things you'd only keep secret if you were a screenwriter and wanted to set up big reveals, but otherwise everything proceeds as expected. A final shot twist means nothing.

But the puzzles are fun enough. Items get used in creative ways. Still, the characters are too flat to get invested in, the scenery so intentionally repetitive that you're never required to know where anybody is in relation to anybody else. It's a utilitarian film, in that way. You watch it for its big moments. I hope Moore continues to make films like this. He's almost there, as far as putting all the different pieces together and making something even better than its pretty-good parts.