IMDb meta-data is runtime 1 hour and 19 very l o n g minutes, rated at an inflated 4.4 by 238 relatives of the director.
Genre: Sy Fy and Bickering
Verdict: It felt terminal.
In distant 2035 an international crew of bickering, backbiting, resentful slackers rides a spaceship to find a new home for the residents of the doomed planet Earth. These are the Bickersons and the fate of the species is in their hands. Game over.
What selection process picked this crew? Spin the bottle? Eenie, meanie, minnie, moe? Or were they the survivors of McKinsey management seminars? No, no one survives those.
The Bickersons awake from a cryogenic sleep – the scriptwriters best friend after the meteor shower — and find the low bid contractor struck again. The captain of the ship is a rotten corpse. Maybe he read the script and took the easy way out.
Thereafter others exit. First the 2-IC (that is, second in command for the pacifists) steps up to the plate. Briefly. Now that he is in the big chair his butt print (the fraternity brothers suggested that image) allows him access to super secret intel. He reads the script and…. Yes, he hung himself in a hallway. So far nothing has happened but the payroll had diminished. Every managers dream come true.
Then the only one who seems to be taking his lines seriously snuffs it while wearing a virtual reality hood to watch a peep show. Meanwhile, others are doing a variety of pharmaceuticals. The snarling Russian in the ranks smokes oxygen burning cigarettes. Sure. That would be a good idea. The fraternity brothers waited for her to don a space suit and light up!
This crew has been carefully selected from the world’s population and this is it! It looks like President Tiny’s inbred cabinet of dolts, droolers, and dopes.
Then there is the automaton who even in death is irritating. Androids can be like that. Even the severed head of the android has been done in ‘Spaceflight IC-1’ (1965) discussed elsewhere on this blog.
It is by the numbers. The dead captain was dramatic in ’Planet of the Apes’ in 1968. The virtual reality was done to death in Star Trek. The drugs have been everywhere. These people did not need a spaceship for such banalities. The mechanical man, a woman in this case, is another tired trope stitched in.
It is all interiors. We never even get a glimpse of the stellar void, or any sense that the space ship is going anywhere or that the Bickersons have any control over it, though we get far too many shots of its vast CGI bulk.
Most of the action is the crew arguing about who is in charge. That part did seem realistic because pointless bickering is on most agendas. They snipe at each other. Denounce one another’s national origins and dress sense. The usual. No need to go into space for any of this.
And they didn’t. The end.
The Italian Sy Fy of the 1970s at least had some energy. Not so here. The direction is leaden. The screen play has no redeeming merits. The set is a card table. Within those limits the actors try to work up some drama, well, some of them do, and others keep looking at their watches. Me, too.
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