IMDB facts: 1 hour and 5 minutes of treacle time, rated at 3.9/10 from 219 opinionators
What happens? The Caine Mutiny in miniature. It is 2015 and the tyrannical captain of a space ship provokes a mutiny. He may have been right at the start but once the trouble starts, it spirals.
Let’s back up to beginning.
In this telling instead of waiting for the aliens to come and tell us what a mess we have made of things, the Earthlings figure it out for themselves. To add authority to this dictum, it is delivered as a prologue by a uniformed figure. It looked like a Coast Guard coat, but who knows. We need a military figure, it seems, to tell us things, and he does.
The mission is a combined effort of the USA, UK, and Canada. Strines missed out again.
The response to the unspecified catastrophes is to colonise space where further catastrophes will, no doubt, ensue. Thus Spaceflight Inter-Stellar One is on its a way to an unnamed new world to plant a colony with its crew, about which more in a moment. Fortunately, unlike most other space ships launched from Earth in Sy Fy movies this one does not encounter any meteors. Whew!
The crew consists of four married couples and the journey will take years. If a number of years was mentioned my ears blinked. We pick up the travellers at the end of their first year in space when things seem to be going fine. Happy smiles all around. ‘That won’t last,’ predicted the fraternity brothers from the back row.
In addition to these eight there is a cyborg with a human head in a fishbowl on top of a washing machine (to keep him clean). He is an interesting addition to the crew but adds nothing to the story, since he does not get around much. There are also three children, one each for three of the couples. but none for the captain and his prime mate. Indeed, this seems to be a sore point, since colonies need colonists. The fraternity brothers wondered if weightlessness might have…. They were skeptical about the gobbledegook about artificial gravity.
That the captain is twenty years older than his mate and an ugly brute might figure in the equation, too.
The final crew members are four spares, who are in a cryogenic suspension, perhaps a hangover cure. Occasionally the doctor opens the freezer to have a look at them.
The children are entertained after their school lessons with a holographic clown. A nice element but again not integrated into the story.
Scene set, now is the time to thicken the plot. The doctor has a wife and she gets woozy. Next thing you know he diagnoses her and finds a life-threatening disease of some sort. More gobbledegook follows. He demands that the captain turn back so she can be treated before it is too late.
‘Turn back? No way.’
This crew was screened in every way for this mission including health, genetics, toe nails, personality, etc. This is most elite of A-Teams, remember that. Yet they each wear a label of their assignment, engineer, botany, doctor, educator, mutineer, in case they forget. This after a year.
If her genes lack moral fiber and get sick, better she should die in space before reaching the new world, That is the captain’s line, as he refuses either to turn back or to consult Earth command on his iPhone. (That her child is on board is not brought into the story in any way.)
Much angst is developed and expended. Sometime in all this confusion the doctor’s wife, who does not want to go back anyway since it would queer the new world for her child, commits suicide by watching this film. Grim.
The doctor, now enraged, seizes the captain with the help of some others, but at least one couple remains loyal to the captain. Now he has command but the doctor cannot turn around and go back and he cannot keep El Capitan in the brig forever. ‘Smooth move, not,’ shouted the fraternity brothers.
Most of the crew are deliriously happy at the change because now they can remove their assignment designations from their shirts. Rip! Off they go. Was that what the mutiny was about? Trivial but apparently true.
The captain breaks free and regains control with threats, imprecations, Key Performance Indicators, and managementese. Mutiny, eh! That means the death penalty. He laments that it is impossible to build a scaffold or arm a firing squad. This is a sensitive New Age captain.
Ah, being a leader, he has an idea. Shove the mutinous doctor out the airlock. Oh, but wait, he is the doctor. No bother. Before we murder him, he can defrost the spare doctor to take his place, if we ask nice. Asking nice is not in the captain’s playbook. ‘Do it!’ is in his playbook.
Defrosting in haste is never a good idea, as cooks know, and the second doctor bursts out of his freezer like Boris Karloff, all stiff-legged, maybe he got arthritis in there, with tubes and sensors trailing off him. He blunders into the captain, and since this thawed doctor came out without his Hippocratic Oath, he whacks him but good. End of captain. ‘Why didn’t someone do that an hour ago,’ asked the fraternity brothers? Good question.
This thawed doctor, though strong enough to kill the captain with one blow, is smacked and dies. Body count: three.
The doctor pairs off with the captain’s widow. Spaceflight IC-1 continues with no further communication with Earth. Thank goodness.
There may have been an epilogue from Uniform Man but the remoter cut him off.
There is nothing stellar about spaceship Otranto. Space outside is a moor, a swamp, a blizzard, a creature from the IRS, a void to cut off the players. The players seem to be trying but the script gives them nothing. The doctor emotes. Some others look bored. (Ahem.) The captain seems constipated most of the time. He repeats three or four times that he has absolute authority in case we missed it the first three or four times. Remember someone got paid for writing this script.
The cyborg, the children, the holograph are all interesting but do not move the plot. Likewise at some point when the captain is berating his wife for weaknesses he reveals he is a member of R.U.L.E. Wow! What’s that? Dunno and we never find out what it has to do with anything, though the fraternity brothers taxed both very little grey cells speculating on what the acronym stood for. None of their suggestions is edifying enough to repeat here.
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