Netflix viewers of the movie Spectral gave it four and a half stars. I am now a Netflix viewer of the movie Spectral, and I say that’s at least four stars too many.

The setup seemed promising: wraithlike beings haunt a war-torn European city, killing heavily-armed and armored soldiers by merely running through them. Invisible to the naked eye, the soldiers are given the ability to see them through an advanced imaging system they wear attached to their helmets. Their weapons, however, are entirely ineffective against this deadly menace.

Enter Mark Clyne, one of the megaminds developing superweapons for DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Project Agency; the only real government agency that sounds like something out of a comic book). Clyne invented the goggles that allow the soldiers to see the ghosts that are killing them. Now he joins a Delta force team to figure out what the ghosts are.

Here’s where the movie lost me: In a matter of a few hours, Clyne re-engineers a camera he brought with him, “reversing the polarity” so it projects a beam that makes the wraiths visible to the naked eye, even when he’s not pointing it at them. As long as the projector’s on, it seems to light up every wraith within eyeshot. Makes perfect sense.

The wraiths shamble like old-school zombies through the streets until a platoon of heavily-armed soldiers show up. Then they go turbo zombie and mow through every single soldier in a blur until, of course, only Clyne and his plucky group of Delta force commandos are left; then the wraiths hang back, moaning spookily, or jumping around like a pride of crazed chimpanzees, but not advancing until the soldiers make a break for it. And then the wraiths run just fast enough to appear to be fearsome, but not fast enough to actually catch anybody.

After the Delta force are evacuated to a mountaintop castle where they can crash headfirst into despair and squabble amongst themselves (“We can’t fight them! We don’t even know what they are!”), Clyne not only figures out what the wraiths are using no more evidence than the mighty thoughts in his mighty brain, he then goes full-blown Tony Stark and, overnight, finds enough electronic gadgetry stockpiled in the castle to cobble together a plasma cannon and hand-held plasma rifles for each and every soldier.

And then they go kill all the zombie-wraiths with untested weapons because of course Clyne was not only exactly right about the wraiths, he also flawlessly assembled every one of the plasma cannons in one sleepless night.

Well. *shrugs* OH-kay!

Spectral is on Netflix. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.