Light sabers and aliens appear in French director Bruno Dumont's The Empire, but this off-kilter comedy fails as either a parody of big-time space operas or as an amusing helping of unabashed silliness. A French coastal village becomes the scene of a battle in which two alien forces -- they're called Zeros and Ones -- compete for control the planet. The aliens occupy human bodies and turn them into warriors in a battle for supremacy. Who knows? Maybe the aliens saw Invasion of the Body Snatchers on their way to Earth. Two principal characters emerge. Jony (Brandon Vlieghe), a fisherman, has been taken over by the Zeros and charged with protecting a baby called The Wain. The Wain will grow up and lead the malevolent Zeros to triumph -- or some such. On the other side, Jane (Anamaria Vartolomei) has been tagged by the Ones to stop the Zero onslaught. Setting a cosmic battle in an otherwise insignificant French village seems part of a topsy-turvy attempt to inject high-stakes drama into a low-stakes environment. Some of the visuals are imaginative -- a cathedral-like structure mounted on the top of a spaceship -- but neither the Zeros nor the Ones provide enough laughs as the movie strains to be outrageous. This Empire strikes out.
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