Offworld: Alien Planet

It must be hard to make a movie - especially a sci-fi movie - on a budget of 57 pounds and 60 pence.

That is how much I presume this movie cost to make as there is nothing that really seems to indicate they spent more than this.

Certainly not on a script, costumes or acting lessons.

As you have gathered this is not a good film.

Dire acting, terrible script, no real plot to speak of. Just half a dozen guys and gals wandering around a few fields in .. Kent maybe ? The icing on the cake and maybe the most insulting part of this is that the "shock ending" the "twist at the end" could be seen by blind freddie 10 minutes after the start of the film.

Do not watch this unless you have done the washing up, if you haven't, do that instead.

Set on a alien planet (Wales, but how many have ever been there?) Earth is dying, and the Tantalus II is on a voyage to a planet that has been found suitable for life. It is a 10 year journey, with most in cryo. An AI runs the voyage, but as they get close to the planet, the AI wakes crew members as necessary. The movie really starts with a rather anti-female officer interrogating the commander as to what happened. He doesn't believe anything she says. And it really alternates between interrogation and showing what was going on. As they approach the planet, an asteroid storm hits them, and the pilot tries to avoid them. They get hit and crash, and the ship is broken into pieces. There is a small group of survivors. Jan Lepree is the commander and John Park is the pilot. Dan Ronson, an ex-military provides a lot of the conflicts. He really denegrates every decision Lepree makes, and most of the bad things that happen are not really her fault. Except for him, due to his training, all are weak from being in cryo for 10 years. He even desires to plan a mutiny to take command. This is low budget, not highly trained actors, and there a holes in the plot. The special effects are amateurish. So how did they do with what they had? Actually much better than some sci-fi films with a much larger budget. The actors gave what they could into their roles. It is not a great movie, and people will not be rushing to re-watch to see if they missed things. But interesting.

This is not a Hollywood production spending many millions. This is a tiny production made by people passionate about films made on a miniscule budget. They have squeezed every drop of production value out of the budget and put it onto screen. The actors volunteered their time and poured their hearts into this movie, exhausting themselves over a very short shooting period and even getting sunburned in winter. The VFX were created by volunteers and they look great. True Hollywood VFX are better but then they have massive budgets and way more people working on it and still many VFX shots in Hollywood movies look bad, mainly due to the VFX companies getting no time and being paid the least the studios can get away with.

I enjoyed this movie, you just have to remember how it was made and not compare it to Hollywood.

When I sat down to watch the 2024 sci-fi movie "Offworld" here in 2025, I had never heard about it. But then again, sci-fi movies is usually not my go-to genre of movies for entertainment. But every now and again I opt to check out a sci-fi movie if the movie's cover or synopsis seems interesting enough. And I will say that the cover for this 2024 movie from director Terry Cooper seemed interesting. However, I fear that the movie's cover was overselling the movie by a lightyear or two, because this was most likely a low budget venture.

The movie release that I sat down to watch was titled "Offworld: Alien Planet", oddly enough. Regardless, I opted to give the movie the benefit of the doubt.

And this was indeed a low budget sci-fi venture.

Writers Terry Cooper and Chris Lynch put together a rather bland storyline and script. The narrative was rather sluggish and it took director Terry Cooper forever to go nowhere, and that made it quite a test of will to sit through this ordeal of a movie. I can't claim that I was particularly entertained or impressed with this movie, and it definitely did nothing to put my reluctance of sci-fi movies to shame.

I wasn't familiar with a single actor or actress on the cast list, which is actually something I do enjoy whenever I sit down to watch a movie. For a movie such as this, I will say that the acting performances were actually fair.

Visually then the movie was actually not too shabby, for a low budget production that is. I've seen far worse special effects and CGI effects in movies with bigger budgets, so at least that spoke in favor of the overall impression of the movie. However, I had a huge difficulty buying into believing that this movie was supposed to take place on a foreign planet.

Perhaps diehard sci-fi fans will get a much bigger kick out of watching "Offworld" than I did as a casual viewer. I am definitely never returning to watch this movie a second time, as it was a struggle in itself the first time around.

My rating of director Terry Cooper's 2024 movie "Offworld" lands on a two out of ten stars.