Monday 26 October 2020

Debug - 2001 meets Event Horizon, meets a film student’s first college assignment

Oh dear.  Just... oh dear.  I like science fiction and I always enjoy seeing a good ‘spaceship’ type set.  Just about the only two big budget ‘spaceship set-type’ movies of recent years were the Star Trek reboots and Prometheus.  Therefore, I always try to give a space movie a chance.  I shouldn’t have bothered here.  If you see this film out on DVD in the shops, you may notice its quite flashy box.  Don’t be deceived.  The cover art is about the most expensive part of this whole film.

Basically, it’s cheap.  That’s really all you need to know.  During the opening scene, you’ll get a sort of establishing shot of the outside of a giant spaceship.  Only it looks like it was designed on a ZX Spectrum.  I probably should have turned the film off there and saved myself an hour and a half.  What follows is six kids (okay, teens – but they acted like kids in my opinion) trying to get rid of an (evil) artificial intelligence from the spaceship’s computer.  The kids wear cheap orange uniforms and I wonder which genius actually entrusted them to this critical mission?  Surely the crew of the Red Dwarf would be more organised than this crowd?  The spaceship is nothing new – white clean-looking corridors and... well, that’s about it.  Nothing new and certainly nothing expensive.

You won’t give a damn about a single character.  They’re all equally bland.  I guess I should be grateful they’re not that annoying.  Anyway, in this cheap 2001: A Space Odyssey set, you get a vague Event Horizon plot where the kids have to face their fears (or something – I was kind of tuning out by this stage).  But, whereas Event Horizon had a cool Gothic feel for its decent, well-known actors to get lost in, this one is just cheap white corridors for its unknown cast to find – apparently – scary stuff in.

Yes, it’s fair to say that I didn’t like it.  Granted I didn’t really hate it, it’s just there’s nothing new here and nothing I have seen, only much better.  If you like your ‘spaceship movies’ (like I do), just watch anything from Star Trek to Event Horizon (or Pandorum – I liked that, but no one else seemed to).  Just forget this and ignore the enticing cover art on its DVD box.

Okay, it had one positive: the ‘HUDs’ (heads up displays) were kind of neat and I’d never seen that special effect before.  But that alone wasn’t worth an hour and a half of my time.

3/10 Jabba the Hutt wipes himself down with this film

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