Space Station 76 - Have you seen the trailer for this?

I happened to catch the trailer for ‘Space Station 76’ and couldn’t believe that no one had already thought of this type of film already.  I grew up in the seventies and eighties and was well into the sci-fi of the day, i.e. with wooden sets, cheesy robots and unfashionable hairstyles.  Therefore, when I saw that a film was dedicated to sending up this genre, only in the modern age, I couldn’t believe my luck.  This film was truly made for me.  It looked hilarious.

I was wrong.  The trailer was hilarious.  The film was not.  Not because the jokes fell flat or didn’t work when they were stretched out into a full-length  feature film, but because the film just wasn’t really a comedy, as it was presented in the one and half minutes trailer.

Yes, the sets are indeed well-designed (i.e. old fashioned seventies incarnations of what the future may look like) and there are a few moments that produce a wry smile from you.  However, the film is actually more of a dark drama and – dare I say it – quite depressing. 

Leaving the kitsch period feel aside, the film is about a space station billions of light years away from Earth.  Some of the inhabitants of the station have lived there all their life, others much of their adult life.  Either way, they’re only one step away from going stir crazy.  Therefore, you have many depressed and broken people, all desperately seeking some form of justification for their existences.

And there’s the problem.  I rented this film thinking it was a comedy that based its jokes on the clichés of yesteryear’s science fiction and I got quite a dark drama about the misery of human existence at its loneliest.

Therefore, I –sort of – didn’t enjoy it.  But that’s not to say that it was a bad thing; I just wanted something different.  Just know what you’re getting before you sit down to watch it.  There are moments of humour, but much of it is very dark and there are places where you won’t know whether you should be laughing or crying at the characters’ plights.  Just make sure that you’re in the mood for something a little tragic that’s dressed up as a silly seventies sci-fi show.

6/10 Should probably keep you awake if Freddy Krueger was haunting your nights