In another context (I think it was during 'Devil Fish'), Crow T. Robot from MST3K said that what they were watching wasn't so much a 'movie' as sort of a 'movie loaf'. Ditto here.
This movie looks as if someone actually spent some money on it - they secured a decent cinematographer,some real stunt men and fight choreographers, built acceptable sets (except for the 'futuristic' computer banks with their wall mounted keyboards and Formica monitors and the laser equipped golf carts) and used good film stock and decent lighting, along with mostly OK costuming (excepting the spandex leotards for the women crew and the female lead); they even got two B grade actors who have been good in other features (Cameron Mitchell and John Philip Law). In fact, JPL is perfectly capable of carrying a film - see 'Diabolik',for instance- which gives hope that the movie might be watchable, in a SCI-FI channel movie kind of way.
But someone forgot to sit down and write a coherent story and script for all the actors, sets, swiped stock footage and fight choreography to be about. Instead we get a whole bunch of sequences that don't link together or go anywhere and a whole slew of story ideas and plot elements that trail off into nothingness. There are space witches in spandex; there are mutineers, there is jarring space battle footage from Battlestar Galactic juxtaposed with TRS-80 Color Computer graphics; there are inane golf cart battles; there are railing kills by the dozen; there is a kidnapping and rescue mission that affects nothing else in the course of the movie; there are 'counter measures' that never materialize and villains that give up for no apparent reason when the good guys are in retreat; there are 'space pirates' who are developed as a looming threat for the entire first half of the movie only to be defeated in 15 seconds when the Adama stand-in flips a switch and unleashes stock footage of two missile launches. That's a fair sampling of the way the movie fails to jell or come together in any way.
And there are MANY lapses in judgment and taste along the way that take this movie to the next level of absurdity. The big one is the casting of the leads. As Mike Nelson once said about Miles O'Keefe, Reb Brown isn't an actor, he's a Body. He can move well,and he can enunciate most of his lines without blowing them, but he is so far in over his head with this mess that it isn't funny. Far worse is the choice of Sissy Cameron as the female lead. She's 35 years too old for the part, far too brittle and self absorbed to be a Princess Leia stand-in and not all the Jazzercise, face lifts and Metrecal in the world can disguise it.
Worth seeing for the MST3K version, which is hilarious, or by itself as an object lesson in the importance of having an overarching vision for a movie before you start filming it.
This movie looks as if someone actually spent some money on it - they secured a decent cinematographer,some real stunt men and fight choreographers, built acceptable sets (except for the 'futuristic' computer banks with their wall mounted keyboards and Formica monitors and the laser equipped golf carts) and used good film stock and decent lighting, along with mostly OK costuming (excepting the spandex leotards for the women crew and the female lead); they even got two B grade actors who have been good in other features (Cameron Mitchell and John Philip Law). In fact, JPL is perfectly capable of carrying a film - see 'Diabolik',for instance- which gives hope that the movie might be watchable, in a SCI-FI channel movie kind of way.
But someone forgot to sit down and write a coherent story and script for all the actors, sets, swiped stock footage and fight choreography to be about. Instead we get a whole bunch of sequences that don't link together or go anywhere and a whole slew of story ideas and plot elements that trail off into nothingness. There are space witches in spandex; there are mutineers, there is jarring space battle footage from Battlestar Galactic juxtaposed with TRS-80 Color Computer graphics; there are inane golf cart battles; there are railing kills by the dozen; there is a kidnapping and rescue mission that affects nothing else in the course of the movie; there are 'counter measures' that never materialize and villains that give up for no apparent reason when the good guys are in retreat; there are 'space pirates' who are developed as a looming threat for the entire first half of the movie only to be defeated in 15 seconds when the Adama stand-in flips a switch and unleashes stock footage of two missile launches. That's a fair sampling of the way the movie fails to jell or come together in any way.
And there are MANY lapses in judgment and taste along the way that take this movie to the next level of absurdity. The big one is the casting of the leads. As Mike Nelson once said about Miles O'Keefe, Reb Brown isn't an actor, he's a Body. He can move well,and he can enunciate most of his lines without blowing them, but he is so far in over his head with this mess that it isn't funny. Far worse is the choice of Sissy Cameron as the female lead. She's 35 years too old for the part, far too brittle and self absorbed to be a Princess Leia stand-in and not all the Jazzercise, face lifts and Metrecal in the world can disguise it.
Worth seeing for the MST3K version, which is hilarious, or by itself as an object lesson in the importance of having an overarching vision for a movie before you start filming it.