(2009) dir. Christian Alvart
viewed: 01/29/10
Bad science fiction. I’ve talked about how I like that, right? Well, badness is in the eye of the beholder, no doubt. And conversely, when the most unusual of circumstances arises, when one of these pretty badly panned films turns out to be a little better than I’d been reading, I gotta say, is it bad, is it good? Hey, I don’t totally know.
This film, starring Dennis Quaid and Ben Foster, is set on a deep space mission, a “sleeper ship” in which everyone has been put to sleep to survive the distance traveled and time spanned. But they awaken to find the ship sabotaged, the timeline way off from their expectations, and worst of all, some crazy humanoid cannibal monsters hunting and killing and preying on all the frozen people.
While it’s far from great art or great filmmaking, the film manages to be a little more interesting than a lot of others by situating the story in the mystery. The characters don’t know what’s going on, nor does the audience. And while the film does start with a few words of prelude about the end of the Earth due to overpopulation and the seeking of perhaps something in outer space, well, the story unfolds, unwinds with the mystery intact. And I liked that. It dragged me in.
And while the movie winds up not being overly inventive or logical as the story does start to get explicated (and even the explication is kind of annoying when it does come), it holds together on the whole. I won’t ruin it by detailing what they find out because that was the primary pleasure in the film for me. And again, once the curtain has been raised, the story is exposed, it’s arguably pretty lame, I wound up liking the damn thing.
Foster is actually pretty good as the hero, sort of understated, as he works his way toward the center. And I liked Quaid as well.
It’s not “good” science fiction. I wouldn’t say that. But it’s not terrible science fiction either. It’s a more interesting than average little film that isn’t generally considered to be all that good.
