Forest Ranger Melissa ( Meghan Carrasquillo ) takes a job as a fire lookout tower observer, making sure there are no forest fires reported across a certain forest area. She needs to report to headquarters by radio at certain hours everyday, to make sure she is on the lookout for anything that seems wrong. While she is doing this, she see strange things happening close to the fire lookout tower. Such as an elderly confused woman showing up out of nowhere with serious sun burned skin wounds. Things are about to become even more strange.
Lookout starts off pretty interesting, considering this is a location out in the middle of nowhere. Just imagine sitting everyday inside a fire tower and you are only allowed to leave for toilet visits, a shower and fix smaller things. I don´t think the job itself looks that bad, it´s even possible you might be bored since you only report forest fires through a radio. I will say though lead actress Meghan Carrasuillo ( who i recognized in the 2023 Tony Todd horror film Devilreaux, which i did write a review of on this blog ), does a pretty good job with her character Forest Ranger Melissa. Considering we spend so much time with her character mostly, it is important that we have an interesting main character that you actually feel interested in. And for the most part i think the character development of Melissa works pretty good. There are some mysterious things happening along the way, especially outside the fire tower that makes the story quite interesting I would say that in about an hour of this film i have nothing to complain about really. But then, in around the last 20 minutes of this film this is where everything falls apart with Lookout. Suddenly this film changes focus completely and become like a low budget version of a Marvel film, where one of the characters can just rip off a car door out of nowhere like it´s Avengers extremely low budget. This is where Lookout lost my interest, because if they would have stayed within the plot of the first hour and just developed the ending differently, i have a feeling this could have been a good film. What we are left with is a disappointing attempt where they threw different ideas together to end the film, and it fails spectacular. Actress Meghan Carrasuillo deserves respect for doing her best, if she only would have been delievered a much better ending i could have easily recommended Lookout. Because there is a interesting story to be told here, if....they would have changed the ending. Director Stefan Colson had a great story here, until for some strange reason he decided to throw it all away. Not a complete disaster of a film, it´s just sad to see a film that could have been great if certain details were fixed. A perfect example that sometimes you don´t have to make complicated plots, as long as you have a good story to be told. Lookout may be forgotten easily, unless there are people who appreciate unexpected twisted turns.
Rating: DD
If you want to watch the film for free on YouTube you can check it out on the YouTube channel Sci_Fi Central on the following link: