Lifepod

We could go endlessly to find all the reasons why this B movie is bad (some call it trash!). However, the basic storyline is good and sufficient action is there to avoid it being boring. It also is a remake of the 1981 Lifepod.

For another remake, this could be done. Take the script and invest in more special effects, good CG scenery for the spaceship, the lifepod and all electronics on board. The script can be further expanded with an additional pod surviving the spaceship destruction. Errors can be easily corrected (spaceship explosion, icing through comet tail and more). Then we have the actors, not great but not too bad. Their characters could be far better defined for a more credible behavior.

Anybody interested?

Eight people on a survival pod. They bicker. Supplies run low. They bicker some more. They're overly dramatic. Poor script. Bad acting. The end. There are two types of sci-fi B movies: it's so bad it good and it's just bad. This one is the later.

This futuristic adaptation of Alfred Hitchcock's classic Lifeboat packs intense action and thrilling suspense into a human drama of courage and heroism. Lifepod features a top-notch cast including Academy Award nominee Robert Loggia and Emmy nominee Ron Silver in the dual roak of star and director. Alone Lifepod drifts helplessly through space light years from the nearest support station. With scarce food water oxygen and communications, nine survivors on this ill-equipped spacecraft fight for their lives. Deadly meteors and asteroids threaten from outside, but the real enemy will come from within. In the dangerously damaged confines of the lifepod, it's come down to survival of the fittest. Supplies are dwindeling, tensions are mounting, and people are dying. Suspicions grow that one of them is responsible for their disastrous predicament. Trapped with a killer, a new battle for survival begins.

Claustrophobic talkathon. Characters are thrown together and then attempt to talk each other to death. It's the well worn crisis of the minute formula. If someone isn't dying, they are talking. It's pretty difficult to maintain interest when most of the conversations are sleep inducing drivel. Crawling around the escape pod with a constantly shaking camera adds nausea to the mix. Make no mistake, this is not "Lifeboat" in outer space. What it is, is a mini budget time waster for the cable networks to endlessly play. Admirers of Ron Silver and Robert Loggia should definitely look elsewhere, as this film gives them nothing to work with. Special mention must be made of the special effects, which are not even of video game caliber. Avoid. - MERK

Far better than I expected, after it began like a Babylon 5 episode. The judge from Ghostbusters 2 is always great. My favorite is "definitely not Keith David" and the little guy. The pixie haired girl is evoking Katherine Waterston in Alien Covenant twenty years earlier. Note a way to present scale with limited means is through eclectic characters. It's a shorthand that goes a long way. Meanwhile I can't remember a single character in Danny Boyle's Sunshine, who are more Silicon Valley techies; I will take these circus freaks instead, even down to the blind mystic.

Ron Silver directing this, the idea you direct a movie and decide to play this character... basically is its ace up its sleeve to just get to his big scenes, and it will read like those blockbusters who cast him.

This is the skill of the movie is it is always finding that one angle to go beyond the mediocre TV movie it is budgeted as, it is always at work painting the process of its failing. When any one angle falters it quickly goes to the next in the bag of tricks. This to me represents inventive filmmaking, for what they all sort of know is a doomed production.

Such as the cinematography. The director understands to do space everyone needs to be sweating and in gritty shadows. A small statement but I swear that is the power of those James Cameron 80s films. I think Interstellar could have learned those old school cinematography conventions read big on screen.

It's cinematic, it's never cheap. The script. The concept of Lifeboat in space is inspired already but this is putting real attempts at science fiction world building and character arcs, and I am like wait, why is this interesting me intellectually too? It's like a good writer's b-sides. Seriously this film punches way above its weight. Even some of the space shots are kind of cool for a 1993 TV movie.