Viking

It's not often that we see a sci-fi film that doesn't have a big budget and not produced by a major studio.

Films within this genre naturally require a lot of money for the CGI and general production design.

However, there is occasionally the odd independent release that has decided to go this route.

This particular new release has got a strange concept that I'm not sure where it was going to go in terms of tone.

Now that I have seen it, it was like I was watching an arthouse version of Red Dwarf with an almost Big Brother environment whilst giving nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey.

The purposeful low budget sets and costumes gave us an effective grounded look to the story. This gave us time to concentrate on the characters and it's themes of achieving your ultimate dream both for you personally and as a species.

Steve Laplante was a very capable lead and I liked the journey his character went. He had a very likable screen presence and I think it was helped by his supports.

Larissa Corriveau in particular produced a lot of the films energy and Hamza Haq gave us some good comedic moments as did Denis Houle

I was surprised at how entertained I was. There's genuine laughs to be had amongst the surrealness of the situation.

You can see that the people behind making it loved the material and are fans of sci-fi.

If I was being picky, I think some of themes could have been better utilised. This would resulted in a more satisfying ending as there were some loose ends not quite tied up.

But even with those issues from a personal perspective, this is still a very entertaining watch. The concept worked, the characters are easy to invest with, the deadpan humour is great, the minimal production design enhances the grounded story well and there's a quirky charm to it that is very infectious.

First, the gorilla in the room: this movie was never distributed properly. I had to vpn to canada to buy and watch it on vimeo.

But it's brilliant, and well worth the effort. It's rather ironic that this movie was ignored because it echoes exactly the sense of purposelessness evoked in the movie.

Why film if you're not going to show it? Why dream of a movie if you're not going to preview it? Why follow your dreams? At which cost?

Anyone who ever dreamt of 'living it all behind' will love this. This is a movie that makes you think about the frailty of the human imagination, and the fragility of dreams in the face of an uncaring world.

The budget is rock bottom, but the produciton value match the 'cynicism' of the film. The viking lander is litterally a bin with 'viking' written on it. It's a powerful metaphor for the sillyness of it all, and the aspiration of a man who could dream big and was let down by a company that uses people for their own purposes.

I can't quite frame it, and I'll be sure to think about this movie many times in the future when i'm faced between opting for 1 or 2 surgars in my coffee.

Wonderful. If you loved i-origins, or primer, or similar low-budget scif-fi, you'll enjoy this a lot.

The echoes of "Solaris" (the 1972 original Tarkovsky, not the remake) are hardly coincidental. The crew's moodiness, the claustrophobic interiors, and the "low-budget" effects here match those of the Russian masterpiece. That same year saw the cult classic "Silent Running" by the ingenious Trumbull, the guy who created the effects for "2001: A Space Odyssey". The notion of parallel worlds is a regular obsession in sci-fi and no less here, something Duncan Jones's "Moon" (2009) delved into with startling insights. For people who dislike unanswered questions and loopholes, this movie is not for you. It's part parable, part puzzle, part piss-take. Seriously unserious and vice-versa.

I so wanted to love. However, I appreciate art-house films, but first the "author" must have something to say to the people who will watch his film; something other than a "flash" on two old newspaper headlines. This film is technically well done, despite some questionable choices, but the screenplay has catastrophic weaknesses. The actors do wonderfully with the material that was put in their hands, mainly Stéphane Laplante, Larissa Corriveau, Denis Houle and Marie-Laurence Moreau. Almost perfect score for the soundtrack (and sound recording). Bad choice of filming location: a little more research would have been beneficial. It's rather long, bland (despite two or three good bits of humor) and generally tasteless. The room was half empty during the viewing I attended.

This was great and deserves a lot more praise than it has received - and that may be in part that it hasn't been available in many places online. I think Stéphane Lafleur said a lot with this in regards to human ambition, the mundaneness of that pursuit, and the humour amidst it all.

More than anything, it caught me by my humanness and made me feel a lot of different things: the annoyances that the crew dealt with, the desire for their young female crew member. But it was all contrived! The organizing members of the Viking mission (and possibly other missions...) were quite hilarious in how manipulative their approach to having the fake crew members replicate the actions of the real crew members were.

I would love to see more of this kind of unique take at sci-fi, the subverting of the all-too-serious expectations of the high budget genre. The only reason I didn't give it 10 stars was because of the predictive nature of the two sugars. It was obvious that by the end, the main character was going to at some point have his redemption of coffee with two sugars. I still enjoyed it, but I think the film could've done with less instances of showing David lingering around the sugar cubes.