Welcome back to my Dark Corner of this Sick World.
‘I wish that jerk would let me alone!’
Star Crystal is yet another Alien rip-off.
‘I've seen it happen many times before.’
so, Astronauts dig up a mysterious object on Mars, and show it to their ship’s scientist.
‘I don’t know guys, look like another rock to me.’
I should never have become a geologist.
But the rock splits open.
Eh, not worth crying over.
2 months later the ship is found floating in space.
'Warning, oxygen at critical levels...'
So this is a little different to Alien,
having met the crew they’re all dead in ten minutes
and we meet another crew on the space station that found the ship.
‘Hello Lieutenant’
‘Hello Colonel’
Which is constructed from the top section of a toy millennium Falcon.
But suddenly the hot girls alarm goes off.
#ALARM ALARM ALARM ALARM#
I should probably go too.
Can the 9 actors we have run around so it looks like there’s more of you?
Then…
So in the opening twenty minutes we’ve been introduced to and then lost 2 entire crews.
‘Problem?’
Our third are the survivors who escape on the ship with the creature on it.
Or, to put it another way; we have exactly the same situation we had at the start
but with a different crew and twenty wasted minutes behind us.
When you reach this point in the scriptwriting process,
you should just start over.
‘You wanna screw up 4 hours of work.’
If the movie had started there I might not have spent the next hour wondering what happened to the space station,
because that’s not part of the plot.
‘What’s going on here? Do you know?’
The remaining cast draw on all their acting experience to react to the tragedy.
So standard Alien rules, crew of five, who will die first?
Turns out it’s the engineer.
‘Billy are you okay’
No. And so into the most important part of the Alien set up, the slow tense build to the next…
That was quick.
You wanna be careful, you’ve only got 3 people le…
Fantastic, sod all happens for half an hour, then you off three fifths of the crew in fifteen minutes.
Also, the final pair just watched their friends die via the obligatory heat signature.
‘There’s nothing else we could have done.’
Except go and help them.
The filmmakers are now faced with the unenviable task of stringing this out with two people who are definitely going to survive
- so no tension - and who barely qualify as characters.
‘No!’
And it’s not just the story that’s badly designed.
‘What level’s on 4’
‘2nd’
Pretty confusing now I stop to think about it.
Also…
these aren’t the traditional sci-fi air ducts,
these are the corridors.
I can only assume every ship in the fleet has its own chiropractor. And…
‘ Can the Speed brakes be activated from here’
‘Negative. Retro fire must be initiated in the engine room’
You can’t stop the ship from the control room.
I suppose you could ask the computer, but…
‘Why won’t this thing answer me?’
‘It’s only programmed for my voice’
I can see a flaw with that.
‘What if you got killed?’
She’s seen it too.
‘I never thought of that.’
The movie needs problems like this for them to solve because even with that pointless opening,
they’ve got time to fill.
And having already killed everyone who’s likely to die there’s nothing else to happen,
except watch footage of football on Mars scored for silent comedy.
#Silent comedy piano music#
The writers must have been thinking...
"I don’t know how the strung Alien out to 2 hours."
Fortunately, they have a totally original ending.
They abandon Alien, and go with ET.
‘Gar?’
‘That is my name.’
Nice to be on first name terms with the thing that killed your mates.
'I killed in self defense.'
Did you?
There’s certainly shades of grey the original ship did experiments on it.
‘In the 2 days before the accident, it went from barely being able to move...
'to being able to find it’s way out of a maze that a 9 month old chimp couldn’t figure out’
Weird they had a 9 month chimp on board.
And as for this crew...
‘She threw acid on me.’
But the alien actively pursues crewman Cal
and cuts off the air while they’re sleeping
neither of which is self-defence.
More importantly, it talks.
Even if we assume it only just learnt English – and there’s no suggestion of that –
it can use the computer, but make no attempt to communicate till it’s too late.
‘I’m sorry about your friend.’
At best there are faults on both sides
and fun though it is to now watch them play happy families this is not a very satisfying ending to a thriller.
‘Why is he such a jerk?’
And it’s about to get worse.
There’s a song.
#In space with a stranger we do what we belive in.#
#Safty or danger there's no place left to hide#
Thanks for watching. For more alien movie reviews, click here.
Are we getting towards the end of the alien rip-offs or are there still more for us to do?
Let us know in the comments below.
'You'll be the first to know captain.'