Hemisphere

For those who enjoyed Sean Connery's Outland from 1981, Chris Maes' "Hemisphere" might be the film that appeals to you.

The film has two central performances from Julie Kashmanian & Paige Rion. Telegenic Julie Kashmanian gives an enigmatic and "can she be trusted" type performance.

Julia Kashmanian is a one to watch, along with her performance in "Ghost Planet," I think it's only a matter of time, before she shines in a film which can show her true versatility as an actress.

Meanwhile Paige Rion has a great look on camera. A cool voice and fine acting chops.

With limited resources Chris Maes and his team have made a film exploring isolation, abandonment and the loneliness of space.

This cheap production has a better storyline than most high-budget Sci-Fi films

Forget the "spare bedroom set" (like, why would a spaceship have colonial shutters and laminate flooring?!), the dodgy equipment (fat laptops with USB plugs), etc., etc. And focus, instead, on the story.

• AI that is given absolute control and is used to evaluate every move and decision of the human user
• Highly commercialised space and planet-exploration, where decisions are taken against stock market decisions
• An employee base made up of underpaid individuals recruited solely to keep their lives afloat
• I could go on with the details of an excellent plot

Think of it as a stage production and it is really captivating, and very clever.

An amazing, off-the-beaten path film, the kind of outlier that gets made through sheer determination and comes out shining. You quickly forget the low-budget conceits and become engrossed in the characters, beautifully played by two actresses I had not seen before (Paige Rion and Julie Kashmanian) but who are compelling and engaging. They bring to life a tense story that careens from paranoia to corruption to an ultimate reveal that is pretty shocking, and will have you thinking afterwards. If you are curious to know what indie films can do differently than gargantuan studio films, here you go. Thumbs up !

This is so amateur that looks like a bad high-school play or something, not much effort at anything really, specially knowledge of Science and Space technology; not even trying to do thing right with the little they could afford. Nothing was realistic, they went into filming without any knowledge of anything related to even film-making, let alone, making it interesting about anything. The "script" has 0 value, it was done by a lazy teenager in a weekend, about some easy crime in space, without any attempts to learn how to write for such. It was really bad, I can't believe they call this a movie, I'd be totally ashamed to even present this.

This was a lost opportunity to show brilliance of any type, since it'd automatically be highlighted for how bad was everything on this movie, not even the camera movement was right, I've seen movies like this but long ago, when low budget was = to low knowledge, before the Internet and computers and AI. Really no effort here; I can't qualify it 0/10.

Such a shame -please read if you're on the production team I truly hate giving a poor review, but this movie feels as if it were made as some kind of school project. It was let down so dramatically by the shockingly poor special effects, staging and costumes. This started with the (even now outdated) iPhone being used for communication on the shuttle, the AI, which looked like a cross between a one-armed bandit and a coffee machine with weird voices and even weirder accents, the whole space station looks like someone's badly made home extension, random bits of badly painted mdf stuck to stuff, a ceramic bathroom sink and wait for it... skirting boards everywhere... on a space station!?! The space suit consisted very obviously of an old crap crash helmet and ski gloves, donned over a set of overalls, I could go on but it's not great karma.

The script wasn't very high standard and the delivery in places wasn't particularly natural. It's a real shame, as this movie had some potential, but the failings were simply too many and too distracting to allow me to enjoy it. I did like the lead actress, despite what she was working with, she did a pretty good job. Also the dead body in the vent gets a thumbs up too.