Crimson Force

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.

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.

Don't accuse me of expecting "Chinatown" here, because I already know the Sci-Fi Chanell has limited means. That said, limited means are no reasonable excuse for limited imagination or vision.

So, it's the future again and one of the not so friendly corporations that control Earth has sent a mission to Mars (there have been quite a few if those lately) to find an everlasting and inexpensive power source. Naturally they crash land in an almost half-exciting, almost well-executed scene which displays good planning ruined by the usual weak CGI. Soon the crew start to die and we find out that one of the crew is a government spy and that Mars is not a dead planet.

Every movie this network makes is either a format genre flick we've seen a million times before or a blatant rip-off of a popular film. At first, "Crimson Force" looks like it's going to be an "Alien" rip-off with shades of "Total Recall". But then the crew enter a "pyramid" (quotes because it has five sides) and get caught up in a power struggle between the ruling classes of Mars's surviving inhabitants. I think we were meant to be reminded of "Dune", but since the sets are so obviously small, the costumes so inexpensive, and the population so sparse, it reminds one more of a sadder incarnation of the 30s "Flash Gordon" serials. The way the second half plays out you'll likely wish they'd just finished ripping off "Alien" and been done with it.

To pad the running time (since the Martian plot is not all the complicated as it's written), our pretty-boy hero Ambrose is given flashbacks which explain why he's conflicted about working for the corporation, which in turn are a set-up to a typical made-for-TV character choice. The results aren't exactly deep. Most of the characters come with a whole two dimensions, including C. Thomas Howell's unlikeable Captain, the two "babes", the guys with accents, and the single non-white male.

The film was not necessarily a bad idea. But an idea is only the beginning and a lot can (and did) go wrong along the way. Apart from the terrible effects and the constraints of the budget, there's the direction. This was advertised as some kind of epic, so the director tries to emphasize how big everything is (the spaceship, the pyramid, the interiors...), which unfortunately just reveals how small the sets really are. If they'd tried some location shooting for once the viewer might not suffer claustrophobia from watching these "epics".

One star for an okay idea, a second for reminding me that I could do it better.

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.

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.