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The year is 2037 and corporations are still running the planet Earth. Advised to abort the first human mission to the planet Mars, due to some spaceship problems, hard-nosed crew leader C. Thomas Howell (as Kyle Baskin) insists on landing anyway. David Flores and his crew survive shaky cameras and their very rough touchdown, but their spaceship needs repairs. As if that wasn't enough to worry about, they learn a traitor is present, intent on sabotaging the mission. The red planet looks deserted, but looks can be deceiving; there may be Martians lurking about. Not knowing what to do, Mr. Howell seems angry. We also follow handsome "Baywatch" lifeguard David Chokachi (as Nick Ambrose). The women are sexy. There is enough here to make good TV movie, but "Crimson Force" fails to put its scattered pieces together.

*** Crimson Force (6/4/05) David Flores ~ David Chokachi, C. Thomas Howell, Julia Rose, Terasa Livingstone

This movie is dodgy, plain and simple. In some sequence you can easily tell that the characters are animated in-particularly the rock climbing shots. It wasn't even good animation. In another shot, the camera is all over the place. The camera man must has being shaking like mad. This is not acceptable in a modern day sci-fi flick but yet this movie was allowed to do it. Apart from that, the storyline is weak also. It all seemed like an episode of Stargate. The alien intrusion on Earths History, the staf like weapons and the dodgy looking crests here and their just gave the film a look of stargate rip-off which is just not on. Fair enough, originality is hard to get these days as almost all ideas have been done at some stage but to copy big elements so glaringly is the sign that the producers were half asleep when they were doing this picture. The acting was OK however but again not the best. Overall this film is a poor sci-fi flick so check out other sci-fi movies if you want to be entertained.

Is there a rating of minus stars that I can assign to this waste of time? Because awful is just too generous. Here is a more accurate description. Grade Z, jerked off and rated S for silly. Good science fiction does not have to be chained to scientific plausibility(hence the genre) However if the characters do not behave in a plausible fashion and the plot shows no imagination then we are left with a film like "Crimson Force". Another pathetic offering from the sci fi channel. Speaking of which who are they making these lame brained movies for. Certainly no one who wants to be entertained by intelligent science fiction. They must get the scripts for their movies from essays written in middle school.....wait come to think of it there I go being too generous again.

Pretty bad as most of the Sci-Fi channels original movies go. Stargate SG-1 is by far the best Sci-Fi channel has to offer. Only draw back here is that O'Neill seems to be out in season eight. The plot in "Crimson Force" is terrible. It really is too much of a stretch. It is another movie where the women are superhuman and the men are wimps. One of the reasons I refuse to watch the new Battlestar Galactica. The original was decent-the Sci-Fi remake really sucks. Starbuck as a womanizing warrior-hero was great. The female Starbuck does nothing for the show. Other Sci-Fi shows such as "Raptor Island" were dagged out far too long. It could have been done in an hour.

Well, really what else is there to say? It was bad...REAL bad. During the exceptionally overacted dialog, I kept waiting for a punchline. Surely this had to be a comedy. But no, every line was delivered with such melodramatic sincerity, that I realized that it was just bad. C. Thomas Howell, in the years since we have seen him, has apparently attended the George Takei School of Acting, or non-acting, as the case may be. He was horrible. I have to ask myself and fellow viewers, when they make a movie like this, do the actors know it's that bad as they say each line that's horrifically worse than the last one? Is it that hard to find quality work in Hollywood? Yikes! I'll keep my day job, which by the way, is not as a professional movie critic.