‘Sting’: Along Came a Giant Man-Eating Spider From Another Planet
Writer/director Kiah Roache-Turner's new creature feature starts strong and ends strong, but it sags in the middle.
Sting is a new movie about a giant man-eating spider from another planet. Written and directed by Kiah Roache-Turner (Wyrmwood: Road of the Dead, Nekrotronic), it belongs to a long, proud lineage of creature features, from which it also liberally borrows: The Blob (both versions), both Alien and Aliens, Gremlins, Critters, Predator (the most iconic line from which is quoted here), and, of course, Arachnophobia (although not as much as you’d assume given the subject matter). It’s not too shabby, but it’s also not nearly as good as the films that inspired it.
This is in part because it has so little of its own to add to the genre… but it’s mostly due to a wonky structure that results in boring wheel-spinnin’ in the middle of the movie. Which is a shame, because the film’s first and final acts are a ton of fun.
Alyla Browne stars as a Newt… er… I mean… Charlotte (yuk yuk), a quirky little girl who lives in an apartment building with her mom, Heather (Penelope Mitchell), her step-dad, Ethan (Ryan Corr), and her new baby half-brother, who I’m sure has a name but I honestly didn’t catch it and it’s not on IMDB.
There’s a bunch of stuff about Ethan and Charlotte struggling to fit their new roles as father/daughter; a medium amount of stuff about Heather’s mother, Helga (Noni Hazlehurst), who also lives in the building, and suffers from some unspecified neurodegenerative disorder; a small amount of stuff about Ethan’s career woes as a comic book artist; and a negligible amount of stuff about other residents of the building. All well and good, but nobody comes to see a giant spider movie for its domestic drama.
We’re here for the title character, discovered by Charlotte when she’s still a spiderling and named not in honor of the singer, the professional wrestler, or the verb, but after Bilbo Baggins’ sword from The Hobbit (which may or may not be an homage to Peter Jackson’s Weta Workshop, which did Sting’s special effects). Even if we did not see Sting’s arrival on Earth via meteorite at the start of the movie, we’d know that she was no normal spider, because she can mimic fairly sophisticated sounds (e.g., a bird chirping, a cat meowing, a baby crying, etc.). Charlotte, enamored with her new pet, feeds Sting live cockroaches, and the intergalactic arachnid begins to grow at an incredible rate.
Then there’s a snowstorm, which causes a blackout, and oh hey wouldn’t ya just know it?, Sting is out of her terrarium, traversing the building via its vents and making a meal out of its residents.
The cast is uniformly much better than they need to be for this material (this includes its most famous member, Jermaine Fowler, who shows up as a less-likable, and therefore more-eatable, version of John Goodman’s character from Arachnophobia). In fact, I’d like to give the entire cast a round of applause, because I didn’t even realize that 99% of them are actually Australian until I was reading about the movie afterwards (Fowler may actually be the sole American in the ensemble).
And it goes without saying that Weta’s effects are top-notch. They’re also almost completely practical, which is always thrilling and far too rare in the modern era of CGI.
Furthermore, Roache-Turner is no hack; the dude has some chops, for sure. The scene below, for example, in which Charlotte walks around her apartment with her headphones on, unable to hear Sting abducting her family, is fantastic. It’s all based on dramatic irony and detailed choreography; it may be better than almost any other single sequence in a horror movie this year.
Out of context, you might assume that scene occurs somewhere around the 30-minute mark of this 92-minute movie, and that the rest of the film is about Charlotte trying to save her family. In fact, it comes around the 60-minute mark, because for most of Sting, nobody knows that the spider is a threat. No one is even killed until around minute 40. By that point in Critters, the Critters have trapped the family on their farm; by that point in Jaws, the shark has already eaten two people, including a little boy; by that point in The Blob, the Blob is fully blobbin’ all over town. But Sting starts winding down as soon as it gets to the good part.
So what happens in the middle half hour of the movie, in between the time Charlotte discovers Sting and the time Charlotte discovers Sting eating people? It becomes two different films - one about the spider, one about Charlotte and her family - which run parallel to one another, not one cohesive narrative. As a consequence, most of the human drama ends up being generally irrelevant. The relationship between Charlotte and Ethan doesn’t change gradually as the two characters combat a larger hazard; it changes very suddenly in the last fifteen minutes of the movie. It makes the resolution between Charlotte and Ethan feel rushed and tacked on.
Roache-Turner likely believes he’s building suspense by keeping Charlotte and her family unaware of the danger for so long: the first scene of the movie shows one of Sting’s later attacks before flashing back a few days to show us how we got here, so the audience knows it’s only a matter of time ‘til Sting gets loose and wreaks bloody havoc. We’re supposed to be like, “Get out! Get out while you still can!”, right?
But that only works in limited doses - it may be great for the scene above, but it’s not great for being two-thirds of the entire movie… or, at least, it’s not great for being two-thirds of this movie. John Carpenter’s Halloween gets away with it, but John Carpenter’s Halloween doesn’t have any subplots about familial strife, and does have at least one character, Dr. Loomis (Donald Pleasance), who does know that everyone is in danger, and is doing something proactive to stop it. There is, in other words, still a sense of propulsion (this is a thriller, after all).
Because none of the characters in Sting suspect that something fishy is going on, none of them do anything about it - there are no proactive characters and no propulsion, which makes the middle thirty minutes kinda dull. Sting winds being a fairly random and forgettable chain of events leading up to one big set piece at the end rather than a unified story. You can’t get caught in Sting’s web, because there’s no web in which to get caught.