Capsula di salvataggio

Ever heard of Alfred Hitchcock´s Lifeboat from 1944? This is the same story only in space. It all begins with a sabotage on big passenger spaceship. It blows up and there are only like 10 survivors who luckily (?) got on the lifepod. And there more trouble begins. They are not able to contact the "starfleet" so they have no one to rescue them. But the most terrifying thing is that they find out that the person who sabotage the passenger ship is someone of them on the lifepod. But who is it? Very thrilling, guaranteed to make you sweat a whole lot. The grade: 9/10

The story is rather formula: take a bunch of different people and lock them up somewhere, put them in some sort of danger and see what happens (for instance: Night of the living dead, Das Boot, Pitch Black). Nothing new here. But the story unfolds rather nicely, with a neat twist towards the end. The acting is quite good and the atmosphere is tense, dense and thrilling. Major dissapointment are the special f/x, which look like the remains from a 50's cheap sci-fil flick. They add a touch of uncredibility to the all thing. Another letdown is the obligatory happy ending, which seems very out of place here. All in all this is a pretty good movie, which could (and should) have been much better - technically speaking.

Eight people on a survival pod. They bicker. Supplies run low. They bicker some more. They're overly dramatic. Poor script. Bad acting. The end. There are two types of sci-fi B movies: it's so bad it good and it's just bad. This one is the later.

We could go endlessly to find all the reasons why this B movie is bad (some call it trash!). However, the basic storyline is good and sufficient action is there to avoid it being boring. It also is a remake of the 1981 Lifepod.

For another remake, this could be done. Take the script and invest in more special effects, good CG scenery for the spaceship, the lifepod and all electronics on board. The script can be further expanded with an additional pod surviving the spaceship destruction. Errors can be easily corrected (spaceship explosion, icing through comet tail and more). Then we have the actors, not great but not too bad. Their characters could be far better defined for a more credible behavior.

Anybody interested?

Far better than I expected, after it began like a Babylon 5 episode. The judge from Ghostbusters 2 is always great. My favorite is "definitely not Keith David" and the little guy. The pixie haired girl is evoking Katherine Waterston in Alien Covenant twenty years earlier. Note a way to present scale with limited means is through eclectic characters. It's a shorthand that goes a long way. Meanwhile I can't remember a single character in Danny Boyle's Sunshine, who are more Silicon Valley techies; I will take these circus freaks instead, even down to the blind mystic.

Ron Silver directing this, the idea you direct a movie and decide to play this character... basically is its ace up its sleeve to just get to his big scenes, and it will read like those blockbusters who cast him.

This is the skill of the movie is it is always finding that one angle to go beyond the mediocre TV movie it is budgeted as, it is always at work painting the process of its failing. When any one angle falters it quickly goes to the next in the bag of tricks. This to me represents inventive filmmaking, for what they all sort of know is a doomed production.

Such as the cinematography. The director understands to do space everyone needs to be sweating and in gritty shadows. A small statement but I swear that is the power of those James Cameron 80s films. I think Interstellar could have learned those old school cinematography conventions read big on screen.

It's cinematic, it's never cheap. The script. The concept of Lifeboat in space is inspired already but this is putting real attempts at science fiction world building and character arcs, and I am like wait, why is this interesting me intellectually too? It's like a good writer's b-sides. Seriously this film punches way above its weight. Even some of the space shots are kind of cool for a 1993 TV movie.