Movie Monday: Extinction

Last week, our young adult sons were home for a Staycation, after our camping plans got rained out. We had lots of fun and enjoyed several good movies! It's hard to choose a movie to appeal to all four of us, but the first one we chose was Extinction, a new Netflix original movie that we all enjoyed.

The movie begins with a man named Peter, played by Michael Peña, experiencing nightmares. In the dreams, he sees some sort of invasion from the sky, violence in the streets, and menacing figures attacking people. We see Peter go to work and interact with his wife, Alice, played by Lizzy Caplan, and their daughters, Lucy and Hannah. They seem like a nice family, and Peter seems like a good dad, though he is tortured by these nightmares that feel real and are becoming more intense and frequent. He comes to believe that they are premonitions, so he goes through the motions at work and at home, until his dreams begin to come true one night.

That's as far as I'm going with a plot description because the real excitement of this movie is its many unexpected twists and turns. There is some family drama, as Peter and his wife, Alice, argue about him working long hours and seeming distant, but there is a sense of dread imbued in the first part of the movie, thanks to Peter's increasingly disturbing nightmares. The rest of the movie is filled with action and suspense, like any disaster thriller, but also plenty of surprises. We all enjoyed it, and even my son and husband - who both always (annoyingly) correctly predict what's coming in suspense movies - were  surprised by some of the twists in this one.

Extinction is showing exclusively on Netflix.