Teleios

In many ways this movie reminded me about the original Star Trek series. The costumes, the props, the effects, the clichés, the play, and even the way it tries to explore social norms and problems.

It's definitely a low budget film, so don't expect amazing visuals. It's not an action movie that would hold you on the edge of your seat, either. It's a drama and if you could overlook 1 hour of SciFi clichés, you might come to enjoy it. I certainly did.

Be warned, the plot does involve 3 different themes, one of which comes out as surprise twist out of nowhere, yet it strangely rhymes with the events on the station. It's not hard to imagine that both are result of the same logic, even though they are completely separate events. In retrospect this twist is probably the reason why I liked this movie and why I would recommend you to watch it.

The acting is about what you'd expect from a low budget film, the two main issues that really drag it down are the pacing and directing: you could easily remove 30 minutes of the film where the characters are just aimlessly existing on the space station. The time wasn't used to develop the characters - there are none - they just keep restating their mission, I almost turned it off during that time because it didn't seem to be going anywhere.

The directing is something else entirely, 90% of the movie the camera just keeps swining side to side, like you're tilting your head left and right constantly, it started making me nauseous and it didn't seem to have a purpose to it either - they had artificial gravity the whole time - it was purely a stylistic choice and it sucked.

The space effects here are good. I rather think they could have included them more often to build atmosphere, and as a breather from the understandably (only) slightly claustrophobic effect of the limited set. I think the makers realised that too and thus put thought into screen backgrounds, a nice touch. If you watch the movie, and you definitely should if you love intelligent sci-fi, then you'll see what I mean. The computer graphics effects were also really good and a plausible technological look forward. I just read the synopsis/blurb for this movie and, if you haven't read it, don't. You'll enjoy the movie much more if you go in blind. At first you may feel the acting is a bit stiff, even for corporate/military astronauts, but bear with it. I loved the story/plot. I would have given it more stars if the direction had heightened the tension of the big reveals. In my humble opinion that required a bit more effort. We want dazzling wow moments, not just how-about-that moments. More than that is the sets, which needed to be way more spacious and a tad grungy, as in Alien movies (it is a mining ship). There's some odd bits of editing too, too many shots of people's boots (very minor criticism). The image on the dvd cover is separate artwork from the movie, though consistent with the style of the cgi. There were some nice effects with luminous pieces of uniforms and light displays on weapons, especially during power outages. I would have loved to have seen more of that. Really cool robot as well. To be honest its hard to review this movie without spoilers. Intelligence over aesthetics, so it's a solid 8 stars from me.

In the beginning two things attracted my attention and caused me to examine this movie: the poster, which is graphically original, and the title which is incomprehensible, unless you are familiar with Greek. After looking it up I learned TELEOIS stands for "perfection". So, my artistic sense was pleased, my linguistic knowledge increased - so far, so good.

Then the time came to watch the film. Knowing its budget was limited I did not expect fireworks of production values, but it not necessarily makes a good sci-fi picture an impossibility. One spacecraft with a crew of 5 is sent to investigate the demise of the crew of another space vessel. A premise more than satisfactory. A certain parallel with EVENT HORIZON (1997) may by seen here, though the Paul W.S. Anderson's work itself is hardly original, as it borrows heavily from NIGHTLYERS (1987).

The rest, with very few exceptions, is sorrowfully miscarried. The direction seems to be almost absent, or present at its incompetent worst. Majority of the actors are so lame it seems their acting lessons had the form of a correspondence course. Especially Lance Broadway, T.J. Hoban and Christian Pitre deliver performances of abysmally bad quality.

However, Ursula Mills makes Lulu AH 320 an interesting robotic character. And then there's is ravishing Sunny Mabrey who can act and can bring some conviction to her lines, her final speech sounds quite poignant and dramatic, but it is not enough to save the misbegotten movie. More than a decade passed since she appeared in SPECIES 3 where she had little to say and served mostly as a nude window dressing. Now she is an accomplished actress and deserves much better roles.

The costumes represent an utter lack of visual taste. And it would have sufficed to remove those hideous frontal brown areas, otherwise they are nicely female figure hugging.

In summarum, this motion picture is worth viewing only for Ms Mabrey, other reasons are extremely difficult to be found. On second thoughts, some might be tempted to see Michael Nouri in his brief video transmissions to notice how he has aged since the time of FLASHDANCE (1983).

I'm going to review this because I so object to the low, around 3 stars, rating it seems to have gotten. It's a science fiction film, but it's not about killer robots, particularly; it's not about planets or star ships blowing up; it's not about aliens invading the earth. It's a quiet, sort of slow film, that seems to be about one thing and then turns out to be about something else. It's low budget but I don't think that is damaging in the least. The acting isn't bad - it's part of the story. In fact, I will watch for the actors in other work just to see how they do. The story, as I said, seems to be one thing, but then starts to twist and turn to an ending that is quite moving.

All in all, I'm glad to have stumbled across this.