Spaceship

Was she actually abducted by aliens? For the love of Carl Sagan I have no idea.

Here's what I do know. The new British indy "Spaceship" is among the most meaningless and morose masses of melancholia ever mish-mashed into a movie. Good GOSH these psych drug saturated sad sacks would make a damn dirge seem downright delightful.

Hey Alex Taylor. It would appear you had lofty intentions whilst scripting and directing this catastrophic calamity. But in the end all you managed to muster is a miserable malaise of avant-garde posturing and pretense blown balistically out of proportion.

Or more fittingly, out of this, or any other, UNIVERSE.

...but it seems to meander from "character" to "character" with no real rhyme or reason. Fragmented to the point that it asserts a deeper meaning without ever actually seizing upon that deeper meaning. Visually interesting, but the narrative is confused by what it wants to be.

There was clearly passion behind it, but passion alone doesn't make for a coherent or engaging story. It relies very heavily on voice overs that have this thematic constant of flight, better worlds, non humans or transcended humans...but all these threads, all these hooks...they never really tie together into anything. Yes, a film shouldn't always spoonfeed you answers, but there's a world of difference between leaving things open to interpretation and making an incoherent mess.

This falls somewhere between the two. Never fully terrible enough to be a mess yet so vague that it straddles incoherence and repeats itself often. You keep trying to piece together the mystery it feels like it's presenting, but before long you realise that is an exercise in futility. Worse still is that despite how clever it thinks it may be, it commits the single greatest cardinal sin a movie can commit. It's boring. Pretentious I can sometimes enjoy, but pretentious and boring not so much.

The film is a sensitive, beautiful, dreamy and colourful look at teenage identity, sad at times, funny at other times. I laughed at one of the poems. It features good music - a grunge mixed ethereal sound and the young actors were believable. Overall it's a good debut and impressive talent.

Caught this as LFF the other week. It's pretty awful. I think it's meant to be some revelatory insight into teen culture but there's no depth to any of the characters - they're just mouthpieces for the director's pseudo-intellectual, pseudo-philosophical stream of conscience stuff. There's not much of a plot - a girl possibly gets abducted by aliens - but the film doesn't have the guts to pursue that with any real intelligence. The writer/director introduced the film and seemed to think that the film was "really weird" and we should "embrace the strangeness", but I think there's a difference between being cleverly strange like Aronofsky or Korine to create an emotional response, versus whatever this is where the filmmaker seems to think that going on about unicorns and rainbows equates to enough depth to sustain the audiences interest. It doesn't. I will say that it looks very nice, there's a sequence at a party with day-glow neon make-up that looks great - but looking great isn't enough. The actors are interesting and some of them have real presence, it's just a shame they're forced to speak the rubbish dialogue.

Deeply unaffecting.

A film populated by vegan vampires (look, no blood!) and apathetic zombies. The only reason aliens would abduct any of this lot, is to have a jolly good laugh at them (and I'm sure aliens wouldn't be that mean).