Strange Planet

Like a few other Australian entries from 1999, 'Strange Planet' is gorgeously filmed but appallingly scripted and acted. The story sees two sets of three friends (three girls and three guys) who stumble to and from bad relationships. In a nutshell, that's basically the plot. Spanning a year, the film certainly covers a lot of time. And neatly too. Each new month is visually introduced by some stunning time-lapse sequences of Syndey. However, once plot and character development come into swing, then the movie just falls flat on its face. Dialogue feels too sparse and wanna-be offbeat, not to mention being so predictable and underdeveloped that it feels more like a synopsis than dialogue. The 'witty' nihilist-turned-romantic banter about relationships is anything but. The plot likewise feels all too familiar, and the ending comes paradoxically unsurprising and undeveloped, so undeveloped that the last shot (an overhead of the six eating breakfast) feels like an insulting attempt at gratifying the audience. Yet another sad triumph of of style over substance. Try 'The Big Night Out' for similar results.

2/5

Strange Planet is set in Sydney and is the story of six twenty-something young folk -- three girls, three boys. If you're thinking "Oh, it's an Aussie version of Friends", you'd be right, and wrong.

What Strange Planet has over the sit-com is characters who you can sort of like, and not want to punch. Unfortunately, as much as you want to like them, they're let down by some appalling writing, especially for the male characters. Tom Long does well with what little he has, while Jeffries and Williamson make do. Of the girls, Claudia Karvan acts Watts and Garner off the screen. Why Karvan isn't a huge star is one of life's great mysteries.

While Strange Planet is hard to dislike, it leaves you with a sickly feeling, not unlike after eating an entire packet of jelly babies. And the ending -- holy mother of... Has there ever been a more tooth-rotting conclusion to a film that has tried so hard to make you like it? No. This is one of those 'close but not really' efforts -- all it needed was a better, punchier, cleverer script with just a touch of insight into the psyche of men. is it worth seeing? Maybe, but for what it's worth, it's still better than Friends.

After her promising debut, Love and other Catastrophes, made on a shoestring budget and employing mostly ex-Aussie soap stars, Emma Kate Groghan misfired with this Friends-style "comedy" - if you can call it that. While her debut embodied verve and a vitality borne of its low-budget, Strange Planet has the opposite effect, mainly because of its bigger budget. With more money, the sets and photography are better but the acting and story are substandard Home and Away fare with a touch of melancholic romanticism thrown in to evoke quasi-seriousness. The acting is okay at times but most of the actors can't really summon enough gusto to deal with the cliché-ridden script. The film is only really notable for the inclusion of Naomi Watts who coincidentally made the pilot for Mulholland Drive the same year. Visually, the film resembles an ecstasy-induced advert with bright tones and little else. One to avoid.

In Australia, New Year finds two different groups of friends, 3 men and 3 women, begin their years in a variety of different ways, however each has ambitions and resolutions relating to their love lives. However, during the course of the following year things don't go quite as they would have foreseen or hoped in most cases.

This film relates to the topic that is hardly new ground - that of love and relationships in our modern age. In the same way, the manner in which the film tells it's story will also seem like it's not doing anything new in a new way, for it isn't. The film homage's (or rips off) several recent (at the time) films such as Shallow Grave and Trainspotting for it's visual style as well as other `youf' romantic comedies for it's content (as well as a seemingly pointless venture off into Taxi Driver territory that does nothing but prove the writers once watched Taxi Driver!).

However, having said that, it still does manage to be quite entertaining and have it's own rough bit of charm to it. It isn't really very funny at any point but it does manage to be quite realistically downbeat without being totally depressing. If anything this rather bleak view of relationships is quite realistic and refreshingly honest - a shame then that it goes and plumps for a happy ending of sorts which relies on coincidence and the usual unlikely devices of romantic comedies. The characters are not that well drawn but they have enough realism to them to make them recognisable and their problems and experiences also relatable. Having 2 groups of 3 character does overstretch the film somewhat though, and some issues are not really dealt with in any meaningful way (an attempted rape just seems to happen without any follow up for instance), but on the whole it works reasonably well.

I'm not sure if the cast are well known in Australia, but I had never seen any of them before (with the exception of Watts and Weaving of course). This helped the characters a bit, as I only knew them as who they were playing. Some of the male actors struggled a bit and it is the three female leads that have the best parts - Watts and Karvan having the meatier characters but Garner being cute, sexy and fun!

Overall this film is not original or different from many other films you could see, but it's bleak view of modern relationships is interesting and involving (until it blows it) and the characters were recognisable enough to involve me in the film for the duration.

If, like me, you liked _Love and other catatastrophes_, then you'll probably like this too. It's not quite a sequel, but it does follow young Aussies thru the period just after college. It concerns three fairly likeable guys and three not-unattractive girls in this in the awkward but enjoyable phase of life, and views their often quirky attitudes to relationships with a non-judgemental eye. It's full of humour, and it's only major faults are that some of the characters and plotlines are a bit cliched and you can see the ending coming from a long way back.