Arrowhead

Can't say much about this without getting into spoilers. But:

* Decent acting * Decent directing * Slacker plot with a lot of unanswered questions

Not a terrible film, but a notch below mediocre. Nice plot twist that's somewhat unexpected, but most of the film is very slow moving, unexplained, with a generous dose of goofy thrown in. If not for the decent acting and characters (including the AI), this would have been a total schlock loss. The actors and directing keep it from getting less than 4 stars... but even they can't save a plot and story line that was lame from the beginning. Simply needed more development and a bit more ingenuity. As it is, it just doesn't work.

It's a low budget film and much is what you would expect. Cliches and bad to decent writing. There isn't a ton of dialogue though so it isn't a big sore spot. Acting is okay to good. Effects are okay except the monster scenes.

Where the movie shines is the world it creates. It's a convoluted and messy story but enjoyable by the end. After the film I had to look up if this was an original story. It seemed like the setup for a comic book or something. Couldn't find anything so I was impressed.

This movie may be a good first time effort for the director, but it does almost everything wrong. The story can't decide what it's about, the characters are thinly sketched and inconsistent, the effects from tolerable to embarrassing, and the sets and locations looked almost exactly like a 70s Doctor Who or Star Trek effort. There is sometimes a decent atmosphere and some camera work is effective. But it's the muddled story which often makes no sense, that killed it for me. It's not that is was too complex, it's simply that scenes, and even individual dialog lines, didn't connect to each other in any way.

I think possibly if you watched it slightly drunk and with the sound off, it could seem like an amusing diversion, because of some effective images - mostly skies with planets and ships. But trying to follow it like a proper movie just leads to disappointment.

This movie was a pleasant surprise. At first it seemed a bit slow and boring, but after a while I was dying to know what was happening to the main character. I would recommend this movie to everyone that can appreciate a decent sci-fi movie without getting bothered too much by the plot holes in the science and the poor special effects. The story is actually pretty interesting if you can sit through the boring part. I'm hoping for both a sequel and a prequel that are better funded.

Story: good

Immersion: good

Acting: decent

Special effects: poor

This is a sincere effort, not a piece of schlock (which is how it earned its fourth star from me), and does quite well with its budget, and the acting is reasonable (I especially liked Shaun Micallef's voice work as the shuttle's AI system, RE3F (pronounced "reef")). The problem is that while the film throws a fair number of potentially interesting ideas at the wall, it thinks that more of them stick than actually do, and if the exact rules of how one of the big ones worked were ever made clear it went right by me.

(It's also frustratingly slow-moving at times. At 95 minutes in length, it could have been easily done at 70 to 75.)