Historically, when a sequel to a film was greenlit, you could rest assured this was because the first film Occupation made a tidy profit for its investors. With the advent of streaming services like Netflix, this is no longer necessarily the case. And Occupation: Rainfall shows us this.

Occupation (2018) made barely anything at the box office or through international sales.

Although it has a much bigger budget, Occupation: Rainfall is marginally worse than its predecessor.

And the new film takes off where Occupation ended. It’s two years after the first film, and the war between “the resistance” and the “greys” (the aliens) rages on.

Its main narrative follows Matt Simmons (Dan Ewing) and alien Gary (Lawrence Makoare) as they travel from Sydney to Alice Springs to find out about “Rainfall,” an alien super weapon sent to Earth eons earlier. On the way,

Meanwhile, Wing Commander Hayes (Daniel Gillies) oversees a giant underground resistance compound, performing secret evil experiments on captured aliens in order to develop a weapon that will win the war.

Virtuous Amelia Chambers (Jet Tranter) takes up her own war against Hayes.

A failure of spectacle

There are fantastic alien invasion films that make the most of the conflicts between different species. Then there are the more tedious variety: epic war films in which the antagonists happen to look weird and talk in a weird way.  These can be effectively done.

It is great to see a sincere genre film coming out of Australia. But Occupation: Rainfall becomes tedious pretty quickly. Given its colonial history, it would seem Australia is primed for a thoughtful, well-made film about alien invasion. This is not it.