Crimson Force

Utter crap. A spaceship crashes and drags along a long skid path. Yet most systems still work on board and the craft stays in one piece - overhanging a precipice. They set out on an expedition to find a universal power source. They quickly find it and one of the crew can read the hieroglyphs written on it's surface. Inside they find the atmosphere is breathable. I deleted as this point - I could not bear to find the Martians speaking English and possessing American-style National Insurance cards. Dear God how thick can the writers/directors/producers be? Still it about the level of sophistication of the average 10 year old.

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.

The year is 2037 and corporations are still running the planet Earth. Advised to abort the first human mission to the planet Mars, due to some spaceship problems, hard-nosed crew leader C. Thomas Howell (as Kyle Baskin) insists on landing anyway. David Flores and his crew survive shaky cameras and their very rough touchdown, but their spaceship needs repairs. As if that wasn't enough to worry about, they learn a traitor is present, intent on sabotaging the mission. The red planet looks deserted, but looks can be deceiving; there may be Martians lurking about. Not knowing what to do, Mr. Howell seems angry. We also follow handsome "Baywatch" lifeguard David Chokachi (as Nick Ambrose). The women are sexy. There is enough here to make good TV movie, but "Crimson Force" fails to put its scattered pieces together.

*** Crimson Force (6/4/05) David Flores ~ David Chokachi, C. Thomas Howell, Julia Rose, Terasa Livingstone

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.

This movie offers some textbook examples of why most low-budget sci-fi movies are bad.

(1) A story scope that way exceeds the budget. I don't know what the budget for this movie was, but they clearly didn't have the money to pull off what they were trying for. If you've only got a million bucks or whatever to make a movie, you're better off making a small sci-fi movie rather than try and pull off a BIG movie with lots of sets, CG FX, action scenes, and characters. The result is, you don't have enough money for realistic sets, good CG FX, and good actors. THe final result is sort of like throwing some chrome on the bumper and adding leather seats to a ford pinto and trying to sell it off as a Cadillac. It so doesn't look like a Cadillac that it becomes an unintentional farce.

(2) It's too derivative of other sci-fi classics, in this case Stargate.

(3) The tone of the story is all over the place because of the varied acting styles/talent levels. The lead actor, C. Thomas Howell, clearly thinks he's in a bad movie and is giving a performance that wavers between phoning it in and camp.. Perhaps he thought it was a bad movie because he spent so much screen time with a really bad actor who's name I thankfully don't know, and maybe Howell was just staying on his level. Now at times, chewing the scenery fits if the movie isn't taking itself seriously, but this movie is trying to take itself seriously.

David Chokachi and the blond actress on the other hand seem to be in a completely different movie than Howell in both tone and look, and are actually pretty good and are taking the movie seriously and acting in a very naturalistic style. Chokachi in particular was really good, but his good performance only sort of magnified how off most of the other acting was. And then there's this third movie that's sort of a soap opera on Mars, and they think they're doing Shakespearian theater, very theatrical and over the top stylistically.

Plotwise, I gave up trying to fathom it at about the 1 hour mark. I don't mind complicated story lines when they're interesting, but when they're not, the movie just lays there. When you're well into a movie and you all the sudden cut to a title card reading "8 years before", you know you've got severe story structure problems. It's one thing when it's the Godfather part 2, but I didn't get why they had this scene. If I didn't know better and if I actually hadn't seen various actors together in the same scenes occasionally, I'd think this movie was an amalgamation of three different movies directed by three different directors. Towards the end of the 2nd act, it's as if the movie knows that it makes no sense, so an alien comes in and gives a long expository scene to try and explain the movie a little. By this time I didn't care.

In other words, a total waste of time unless you want to watch all the ways a movie can go wrong.