Osiris

The Ballad of the Displaced Soldier

Science fiction cinema has, of late, become a sprawling architectural project—vast cinematic universes built on green screens, populated by heroes whose struggles are often obscured by the sheer weight of the digital worlds they inhabit. In this landscape, William Kaufman’s *Osiris* arrives not as a sleek new skyscraper, but as a brutalist bunker: concrete, unpolished, and undeniably solid. It is a film that rejects the modern mandate for "world-building" in favor of something far more primal and claustrophobic. Kaufman, a director who has long carved a niche in the gritty underworld of direct-to-video action, here attempts to transpose his tactical obsession into the cosmic void, resulting in a work that is as frustratingly derivative as it is fascinatingly kinetic.

The premise is deceptively simple, echoing the muscular genre staples of the late 1980s. A team of Special Forces operators, mid-firefight in a dusty, terrestrial warzone, are plucked from their reality and dropped into the belly of an alien vessel. This transition—from the chaotic, horizontal violence of a desert skirmish to the vertical, suffocating labyrinth of the spacecraft—serves as the film’s most potent visual metaphor. Kaufman’s lens, usually trained on the mechanics of urban combat, adapts surprisingly well to sci-fi horror. The ship is not a pristine vessel of light, but a dungeon of dripping fluids and industrial decay. When the commandos awake, stripped of their geopolitical purpose and reduced to biological currency, the film briefly touches upon a profound vulnerability: the realization that the "apex predator" of Earth is merely livestock elsewhere.

However, *Osiris* struggles to maintain this philosophical tension, often surrendering to the rhythmic comfort of the tactical shooter. The film’s visual language is a hybrid of *Aliens* industrialism and *Call of Duty* kinetics. There are moments, particularly in the first act aboard the ship, where the darkness feels oppressive, where the practical effects—a welcome respite from the weightlessness of modern CGI—grant the alien antagonists a terrifying, tactile presence. You can feel the slime; you can smell the stale air. But as the ammunition starts flying, the film retreats into the safety of muscle memory. Kaufman is a maestro of ballistics, and the action sequences are executed with a precision that shames many higher-budget contemporaries, yet one yearns for the narrative to be as daring as the stunt work.

The human element is anchored—and occasionally weighed down—by a script that mistakes jargon for character development. Max Martini, playing the scar-faced commander Kelly, delivers a performance of stoic capability, but he is less a character than a function of the plot. The emotional gravity is outsourced almost entirely to Linda Hamilton, whose arrival in the film’s second half operates as a kind of meta-textual benediction. Her presence summons the ghosts of Sarah Connor and Ellen Ripley, lending the film a gravitas it hasn't quite earned on its own. Watching her navigate the shadows, we are reminded of an era when sci-fi action was driven by desperation rather than spectacle.

Ultimately, *Osiris* is a film defined by its limitations, which it wears like armor. It does not aspire to the cerebral heights of *Arrival* or the operatic scale of *Dune*. It is a siege film, a survival horror that trades in sweat, blood, and the terrifying indifference of the cosmos. While its narrative beats are predictable—almost ritualistic in their adherence to genre tropes—there is an honesty in its execution. It suggests that when the sky opens up and the unknown descends, we will not meet it with speeches or diplomacy, but with the desperate, futile, and deeply human crack of a rifle in the dark.