Dark Planet (1997)

Too much of everything

Just perfect...

Captivating movie !

An old-fashioned movie made with new-fashioned finesse.

I spotted this in a £1 shop, and figured any movie for £1 is a good deal. How wrong I was.The first scenes of this visual monstrosity contained the worst space battle I have ever seen. The movements of the ships were quite literally worse than those on Red Dwarf, a British sitcom with intentionally bad space animation. This set the scene for the rest of the film.The script was the sort which leaves one torn between writhing in agony and collapsing in side-splitting laughter, and though delivered by the cast to the best of their ability, you've got to ask how on Earth they were persuaded to sign up to this.Dark is an appropriate title - now we all know that an eerie space ship on a dangerous mission is dark on the inside. Alien did dark space ships well. Dark Planet did not. Even with all the lights off the curtains drawn, I struggled to make out who was who, what they were doing, why they were doing it.And to top it all off, the plot is so rotten it could well have been dead for 20 years, and no one told the writers. The predictability is on a par with tossing a two-headed coin and trying to guess the outcome.Awful, awful, awful. I might actually go and ask for my £1 back.

Where is the crew of the Satellite of Love when you need them!!! Only MST3K could help this out! The ship is dark, the costumes are dark, the lighting is dark, and some of the effects budget must have been used up before they started. Skip it.

Add together no script, no plot, no acting, no make-up and 8th grade TV class special effects and soon you have a Sci-Fi sleeping pill that would knock out Darth Vader. Set in the human geno future, Dark Planet concerns the quest of two human genes species attempting to claim the last piece of unpolluted solar Real Estate. For some unknown reason the script says the two warring side must accomplish this task together with one side furnishing the ship and the other a Captain. Throw in a double cross, some hidden soldiers, a couple of shoot-em-ups and you'll be asleep in no time. This movie comes complete with a James Mason look-a-like Captain, advanced humans with skin problems, left over Storm Troopers from Stars Wars and lots of pancake makeup. I couldn't decide what was worse the acting, make-up or special effects.Two thumbs down on this one.

The basic plot of "Dark Planet" is that two sides in a brutal war (one side being the Alphas and the other the Rebels) inexplicably set aside their differences and join forces to send a mission to the so-called Dark Planet. This is the first and only habitable world to have been discovered by humanity. The problem is that it is located in orbit around a star that is on the far side of a wormhole, an astronomical feature that is highly dangerous to spacecraft.The six member crew of the starship Scylla is composed of three Alphas led by Commander Winter (York) and three Rebels led by Brendan (Kozak). The ship must survive the dangers of space and of the wormhole as well as treachery among the crew.Oh boy, where do we start? Well, the special effects for one. Though it was apparently made in 1996, "Dark Planet" is plagued with some incredibly low-budget effects that in 1980 (the same year as "Battle Beyond the Stars") would have looked bad. The screenplay is very weak. Weapons in fight scenes aboard the Scylla are obviously twentieth century firearms (such as the AK-47) despite the fact that the film is set in the twenty-seventh century. Logic flaws abound, one of my favorites being the ability for two characters to don bulky spacesuits and exit the starship in less than sixty seconds. On the surface, it seems that the bulk of the obviously limited budget went for the cast, which is surprisingly strong (most notably, Michael York, Harley Jane Kozak, and Jeff Beck). Some of the interior sets are passable, but not extensive."Dark Planet" is a film one could spend a lot of time picking apart, but it frankly isn't worth the time. Nor is it worth the viewer's time. Avoid this one.