Project Gemini

I am a great fan of space horror movies so I tried Project Gemini. The pro: the production is okay, nothing special but okay. The cons: a script that follows every possible cliche of the genre, also the acting, I am tender here, is improvable, and the story misses momentum and a feel for pace: before anything interesting happens we get all that necessary blabla and introduction that made me almost doze off into Morpheus arms. Anyway, compared to the benchmarks of the genre (Alien, Event Horizon, Pandorum) Project Gemini tastes just very weak. I would even prefer to watch Life (2017) again, which in my view is a very mediocre movie because it lacks of the same issues: a story too predictable and every cliche of the genre squeezed in, but at least the techs and acting are fine ones.

From the outset this film will tell you how poorly written it is. From characters that are far too stupid to be operating a mission of this magnitude to the standard space exploration film events. The cgi is good. Bit that's about all this one has to offer.

Anything visual in this movie is superb. The CGI, special effects and anything space related is suprisingly good, especially when you see similar US made movies with a tenfold bigger budget looking like a final year filmschool project. Watch any space movie with Bruce Willis in the past ten years and you see what i am talking about.

Now to the bad parts, writing of the story, any dialogue and finally the acting.

Sure, i saw the dubbed version, but still - none of the scenes involving people, looked like they actually were people.

I liked the final twist, but the plotholes are just a little to big to overcome. There are several places where the movie could have taken us to some seriously interesting places, storywise - but instead it always went back to cliche´town.

In the past ten years, there have been some really interesting sci fi movies from Russia, but they seem to be hit or miss, and when they miss, they miss big time, and unfortunatly - this one miss the target, and does it big time.

If you want to watch a sci fi horror with a loved one, and know that any of the Alien movies is to scary, this might be good for that.

As for the rest of the movie... no script, card reading acting, stiff. The plot is the usual - earth is dying from pollution and disease, a compatible planet is found, and off go our protagonists with an alien artifact found deep in the earth to terraform the new planet. Not a bad plot, but OMG, the acting: none; the script: none. So wooden. It's hard to believe they couldn't find real actors, or maybe just didn't want to pay them. It's painful to watch. I kept my fingers on the FF button through the whole movie. I've seen some great Russian SciFi movies, in fact they're very good at it, but this is just painful. There's a monster, of course, ripped straight off Alien, but only a couple glimpses of it. Not kidding, you really don't want to waste the time.

The directing was bad - especially directing the cast, who were cringeworthily bad to begin with. That one guy faking a deep voice to sound tough was a joke. But the writing was even worse. There was so much ridiculous and phony dialogue in between a whole bunch of filler with very little substance, that the 98 min runtime felt neverending, especially in the first half. The last half had a little suspense and thrills, and some nice twists and a partially cohesive story coming together, albeit generic and cliched. But what was impressive and the reason for my high score of 5, was the excellent cinematography and stunning visual effects. This film may have been more appreciated as a short, with all the filler and nonsense dialogue edited/cut out. Nevertheless, it's a 5/10 from me.