There’s a lot of negative things to say about this movie, which the authors of the reviews prior to mine have already done to death, and I’m not really going to argue with them: this is a badly made, lethargically written film. It’s a textbook B-movie. However, unlike virtually every other low-to-no budget Science Fiction film I’ve ever seen, this one actually tries to work some actual “Science” into the fiction, and for that I give them high marks for trying, even if the rest of the flick completely undercuts the interesting time dilation aspect of the film.

Here’s the deal: A flotilla of starships have been on the planet “Centaurus” for some time, and are heading back to their homeworld again, launched in six-month intervals. There’s a human civilization (Composed of Asians) on Centaurus that has fallen on hard times, and appears to have been colonized by the Caucasians. En rout back home, some Centaurans rebel on one of the ships, and it goes off course, eventually crash landing on the heretofore uncharted planet “Solaris 3”. The flagship of the flotilla decides to go back to look for survivors, and eventually meet up with the child of the survivors of the crash.

Here’s the cool stuff: 1) They point out in great detail that they’re traveling near light speed, and hence time is passing slower for them aboard ship than it is back on their homeworld. The starship’s helmsman points out that by the time they get home again, his brother will be 32 years older than him. It only takes the rescue ship three weeks to get to Solaris 3 in subjective (Shipboard) time, but objectively, on the planet 18 years have passed. How freakin’ cool is that? Come on, after a lifetime of watching lousy SF films where interstellar flight is as easy as hopping an airplane to Reno, you have to admit one which actually deals with Einsteinian Relativity is pretty sweet! It’s a very cool idea to have someone look at a functional ship he just saw six months before, and yet it’s derelict wreck that’s been sitting in a jungle for 18 years. What’s that? You find relativity confusing? There there, sparky, that’s OK. Why don’t you go back to watching Star Trek and leave the science fiction to the big boys, OK? That’s a good boy… 2) The race relations aspect of the movie is pretty neat, too: the astronauts are all Caucasians, the Centaurians are all Asians, and neither side really trusts the other. Some of the Caucasians don’t even consider the Asians to be human, despite the fact that they obviously are. Again, in an age when all SF postulates a future where all races live together in a spirit of peaceful unity, it’s kind of charming to see a movie that dwells on how hard it can be to attain that kind of unity. 3) This movie actually goes out of it’s way to imply a larger history than we actually see on screen, which is pretty clever. The Admiral believes (According to dialog in the film) that humanity established interstellar travel millenia ago, and then lost it for whatever reason. The Centaurans are the descendants of human colonists that adapted to the conditions of the planet Centaurus over scores of thousands of years, which is why they look different than the spacefaring humans who found them. 4) Irene Tsu is just smokin’ hot in this movie, seriously. It doesn’t hurt that her cave-girl sarong is slit up the leg all the way to her waist, but even without that she’d still be just..wow. I remember seeing this movie for the first time when I was 10 (On Dr. Paul Bearer’s “Creature Feature” show) and getting strangely attentive whenever she’d come on screen and eat a banana or kick her legs when being carried off. I was only 10, mind you, I had no idea what it was about her that was affecting me so, I just knew that I felt pleasantly happy whenever she was on screen. 5) The final twist of the movie actually came as a big shock to me. Granted, I was ten, but it does kind of come out of nowhere, and it is sort of neat.

To conclude, I’m not saying this is a good movie because it certainly ain’t. I *am* saying that it tried really hard, that it’s got more interesting ideas than an entire season of Next Generation, or the entire series run of Seaquest (Not that that’s hard in either case), it actually tried to say something about race relations, and while it unquestionably failed artistically, I have to admire it for tackling the big questions when so few more professional productions would even take the chance admitting the questions exist.