Dante 01: Prisão Espacial

So, there is this space prison filled with bald criminals...heard this one before? Corporate scientist Elisa (Linh Dan Pham) arrives on a prison ship with plans of using the felons as guinea pigs for a new DNA altering serum. Also arriving on the shuttle is new prisoner St. Georges (Lambert Wilson). Quickly thrown into the tiny populace, the prisoners notice something is not right with the new inmate when he begins miraculously healing other inmates.

Marc Caro - co-director of the DELICATESSEN and THE CITY OF LOST CHILDREN - makes his long awaited return to feature film-making but, unfortunately, this seems a step back. The film is visually stunning but the religious allegory heavy plot doesn't do it any favors as Caro seems to be mimicking 2001 and SOLARIS. This moves along at a pretty deliberate pace until an ending pops up that will make you scramble for the DVD menu, thinking you've inadvertently skipped a chapter. It literally comes out of nowhere and you can almost hear the money men pulling out of the project (reportedly last minute financial woes forced Caro to change his original ending). Interestingly, the US DVD has a 30-minute "making of" extra and co-writer Pierre Bordage mentions this was a project originally developed for Alejandro Jodorowsky. There is a great cast including DELICATESSEN lead Dominique Pinon and DELLAMORTE co-star François Hadji-Lazaro.

I really wanted to like this film, since I've had good luck with French flicks lately as well as being interested in the neat little cast assembled here. Among them are Lambert Wilson (the Merovingian himself) and Dominique Pinon (Delicatessen, Amelie, etc...). Mix in a little Cube, throw in a dash of Alien 3 and sprinkle in some Powder for good measure and you have the undercooked hodgepodge of Dante 01. Good sci-fi is hard to come by these days, mainly because I think it's the most high concept genre of film as well as the hardest to execute really well. Unfortunately, despite some very interesting ideas and good production values, it doesn't add up to much of anything when it was all over. Wilson's main character has almost zero lines in the film and isn't really even a main character. If you're going to have your main character remain essentially silent, that's fine, but for the love of Odin please make him interesting. I completely understood what was going on, but it just didn't register with me as much as I was hoping it would. There is a sequence just before the last shot of the film with Wilson outside in space that was just so agonizingly excessive that I was swearing at the screen for it to stop, which I hardly ever do. Maybe you'll have a different opinion, which is fine. But for me, no dice.

Got the chance to see this at the Sci-Fi London last night in a packed cinema. As a big fan of City of Lost Children and Delicatessen I was suitably excited. The film establishes itself from the off with a very confident and distinct visual style and sense of (the deep, dark void of) space.

A man arrives at a colony circling the fiery planet Dante, his name and history unknown. The ship is a base for psychiatric research on a handful of criminals, held as guinea-pigs and cut off from outside contact. The new man is seen as a messiah by some of the convicts, a trouble-maker by others, as the psychiatrists carry out routine and risky genetic experiments with their DNA.

The film maintains a heightened feeling of tension and claustrophobia that is almost migraine inducing but transfixing. The editing is first rate and the film is well acted (Dominque Pinon, a Caro and Jeunet regular, appears). Unfortunately, the plot keeps promising to go somewhere but ends up disappearing down a black hole of messianic symbolism, and the dialogue is fairly bland and perfunctory. The violence is also almost sickening at times, though this may not bother some.

This is a very confidently directed film that is clearly the unique vision of one very creative visualist, I only hope Caro could have applied his touch to better material and not surrender to pretensions of the religious and philosophical. I'm not suggesting that no film should try to tackle these things, but this film doesn't deliver enough of anything else. Many will call the film deep but ask them what it's about before you believe them.

Worth seeing, though. Definitely deserves better marketing, but I wouldn't want to be the one to do it.

Boring.. DISAPOINTED! NOT RECCOMMENDED. WATCH is 90s work. maybe Jeunet is key for cinematography. darkly shot. not much for ambience that work for me, minimalist environment decoration- uninspired filming-direction I red that they run out of budget.

I expected to watch this movie for a long time. It is not easy always to get access to French or other non English speaking movies. I knew about the bad comments but the director previous work convinced me of this one.

The story is interesting and the idea of a possible messiah in a jail is very compelling. The main character never talks too much and you never know exactly what was in his past. That is a good ingredient that several westerns exploited very well.

The beginning promises a psychological thriller in space like Moon from Duncan Jones or the creation of a religious cult like the one existing in Alien 3. Unfortunately we don't get any or that, only the promise and the glimpses of what it could have been.

The end is confusing to say the least and the director appeared to rush to end the movie. Some of the news in the trivia section may explain why this movie appears to be an unfinished work. Cutting the budget in half changes whatever the director had originally in mind. That is a shame because the movie had potential.