There is no reason on earth to watch this testosterone driven pile of pseudo homo-erotic horse cookies masquerading as an SF movie. The story could have been written on the back of a postage stamp (but is credited to have taken FOUR people to concoct). The visuals are totally derivative; take Alien, Outland, bits of Blade Runner, shove through blender. The acting is abysmal. Not even McDowell can summon up the effort to be interested in his lines and he can usually be counted on to have some fun with his roles.
If you do watch this movie after reading the trashing it gets on the IMDb there are some rewards to be got from it. It’s one of those movies that lets you sit there and ask yourself questions like: What are the teenage whizz kid navigators actually FOR? All they do is say “Go faster!” or “Go up!” I mean if the muscle-bound ex-prisoner fighter pilots can’t work out that crashing into canyon walls in a speeding helicopter is not a good idea then they are even thicker than they look (and boy do they look thick – physically as well as mentally. Where did these guys learn to fly? – The Charles Atlas Fight School of dynamic tension?).
As it turns out, these guys ARE as thick as two short planks because, having been told that their lives are in the hands of their teenage navigators they seem to think it’s a good idea to anally rape one of them in the shower. Not clever.
Other questions you might like to ask yourself include why ALL the doors in this movie give off huge spurts of steam every time they open, or close. In fact, why does _everything_ in this movie give off great spurts of steam? Everywhere people go on the mining station steam shoots out at them from walls, doors, ceilings, and floor – even, unbelievably, the cockpit of a shuttle craft. They have steam lines in the cockpits of shuttle craft? Steam powered spaceships? Wow! Welcome to the future! In fact the only place where there is no steam to be seen is in the kitchens, the only place you would EXPECT to see it. It’s that kind of dumb stupid movie. There must have been at least 3 guys on set whose only job was to fire off fire extinguishers at random – and stoke the smoke machine. There is an awful lot of smoke in this movie.
It also has that standard shot of space ship approaching planet. You know the one. Static peaceful planet swimming in space. Suddenly there is ominous music and from the side of the frame comes a metallic something which just keeps on going and going, getting bigger and bigger, a vast 3 mile long pile of plastic glued together to look like a spaceship, on and on it comes until the glowing bits at the back finally come into shot with a sound cue of jet enginey noises. Finally with this movie I worked out what has always bugged me about that shot. If the engines are blasting away like that it means the the ship is accelerating towards the planet. Surely anything having crossed interstellar space would be DEcelerating as it approached its destination. Standard operating procedure for that would mean that the ship should be approaching the planet arse first with its engines going – unless they were blasting out Suckions an as yet undiscovered form of anti-acceleratonic particle. Christ I was bored.
If for nothing else I will be grateful for this movie for being so vacant of anything worth watching or caring about that it gave me time to think that one out.
