The Becomers

Can polished, entertaining sci-fi effectively be delivered on a shoestring budget and under a tight shooting schedule? If writer-director Zach Clark’s “The Becomers” is any indication, the answer is a resounding “yes.” Add to this ambitious mix a sharply written story and script, skillful film editing, an innate quirkiness, a wry satirical bent and inventive, impeccably timed humor, and viewers have got a top-notch, quasi-campy sci-fi comedy on their hands, one well worth the watch. The filmmaker’s latest tells the story of a pair of star-crossed alien lovers who manage to escape their dying planet and come to Earth but are now desperately trying to find one another once again. It can be a challenge given their unfamiliarity with the ways of their new home, as well as their inescapable need to regularly appropriate (albeit, somewhat surprisingly, seemingly innocently) the bodies of human hosts (think a far less menacing, more sentimental version of “Invasion of the Body Snatchers,” with its inherently grim events supported, ironically, by a sweet, but unusual, and certainly undeniable love story). Eventually, however, the differences between the two worlds invariably catch up with the duo, with their frequent (and often-improvised and opportunistic) switches involving them in an array of diverse scenarios populated by such characters as a woman in the process of giving birth, a cult of radical (but politically and spiritually oriented reformist) terrorists, and a corrupt high-ranking politician and his largely dysfunctional family. In telling this tale, the film serves up a big platter of laughs (some guilty pleasure-level goofy, others supremely witty and genuinely inspired), accompanied by ample introspections into such topics as gender and racial identity, the undeserved clout of crooked government officials, the metaphysics behind the nature of “being,” and the complicated relationship between survival and remorse, not to mention a whole lot about love. And it’s...