douggers

A top-secret government lab blows up, 1 saboteur (Michael Sarrazin)survives and a super-abrasive, super-tough government super-agent reins Sarrazin in then reels him out like a super-fisherman playing with his catch. All the "suspense" in this movie comes from the fact that Sarrazin can't remember the secret data that's supposedly locked up in his brain and can't even recall who he is working for, while super-agent George Peppard spends nearly the entire film trying to get Sarrazin to cough up said data. Other than the weak and unconvincing interplay between the two principals and Sarrazin's dallying with a lonely widow, there is simply nothing happening in this film. The "action scenes" are about as exciting as watching someone mow a lawn and the big "twist" ending makes little or no sense. The author of all this nonsense must think that having a secret lab blow up, having the blower-up be an amnesiac and having the blow-ees become crispy critters is very exciting, but alas it's not. He doesn't seem to understand that characters need to be more than one-dimensional and stories - even sci-fi thrillers - need to be interesting as well as plausible.

Sorry, sci-fi and Clooney fans, but this one seems silly to me. Byline: Astronaut visits space station and soon his dead wife, friends and fellow astronauts show up one after another. Makes us wonder if an alien intelligence has read said astronaut's mind and is tricking him into returning said station to Earth for its own inscrutable purposes.

For 1985-92 Outer Limits fans, this is familiar territory. Humans in outer space typically see lost loved ones and/or have their minds taken over by aliens, who, having no "lives" of their own, just hover in space, waiting for human victims to come by to be victimized. Not that The Outer Limits doesn't have some good stories, but rather that the writers pepper their young audiences with aliens getting inside their skins or inside their minds, to the point where we've come to expect these once-novel, now-tired sci-fi clichés.

Fans of "clairvoyant" John Edward, who "connects" fans to their deceased relatives, may also find this kind of thing rewarding, as it perpetuates the dead-coming-back-to-visit-the-living idea. I wouldn't call this sort of film "science fiction," as there is no science and it promotes the idea that when humans go into space they see not what the universe gives them but what they want to see - lost loved ones and fanciful and tantalizing vistas that have nothing to do with the mind-boggling universe that actually exists.

I thought Robin Williams' "What Dreams May Come" explored this territory much better and more imaginatively, even if it was meant to represent the after-life and is not "sci-fi."