You know what you should not see after Phoenix Forgotten: Hangar 10, also known as The Rendlesham UFO Incident. Actually never watch it, but the proximity only hurts Hangar 10 more. Hangar 10 is a found footage film that takes place in the same location as the Rendlesham Forest incident, which occurred in December 1980 near a US Air Force base in England and involved UFOs. Think Roswell with accents. Three people, a metal detector enthusiast, his girlfriend and her friend, who clearly wants to be her boyfriend, go on a treasure hunt for gold, but find more than they expected.
No one would go camping with these three people unless they hated themselves. Even without the UFOs, the trip would be a disaster. Almost everything that Phoenix Forgotten got right, Hangar 10 got wrong: shaky cam, love triangles, awful pacing, annoying archetypes instead of characters, thin story, plausible premise. The special effects are cool. There is a thin conspiracy, experiment angle thread throughout the film, but it is so underdeveloped and feels like an afterthought although it is probably the most interesting and creepy part of the film. It is almost as if someone watched Lost and learned all the wrong lessons or watched Close Encounters of the Third Kind and decided that it would be better if you hated the human beings more.
Hangar 10 thinks that what makes a film about inexplicable phenomenon strong is the weird sounds, the flashing lights, the equipment malfunctions, but fails to earn audience interest to make the sensational moments count. Instead found footage films need to invest in its characters so when it is time for spectacle, we still care. If you don’t want to do that, make a spectacular short film and stop boring your audience.
Hangar 10 missed an opportunity to borrow from X-Files and contagion films to make a creepy found footage film that could have sustained our interest. I suppose that Americans can finally pat themselves on the back for finally doing something other than revolution better than the Brits. Skip Hangar 10.