Very good...

Rating: Null/10 (30 May 2001)

I've been looking forward to seeing this film for quite a while and I'm glad to say I wasn't disappointed. With this in mind I'll begin by commenting on the low points so as to end on a high. Spoilers alert The general premise of this film was pretty unoriginal and the story contained a few cliches, not to mention some moments which require a fair bit of suspension of disbelief. Some people have complained that it was ridiculous for a psychotic killer to be transported on a passenger ship, but I can accept that the mercenary "Johns" might have wanted to keep his trip back to Earth low-key in case a competitor tried to relieve him of his quarry, and we have to remember he was an independent mercenary and probably not possessed of infinite resources.
It's a little hard to accept that the ship would crash at exactly the right time in the 22 year cycle to experience a total eclipse, and the astronomical model in the film seems to show three incredibly small stars somehow linked together, orbiting the planet. Perhaps the centre of the model wasn't actually the planet, I'd have to see the film again.
The aliens seem to change drastically throughout the film, from some creepy looking "starfish" to swarms of bats, then from three feet tall quadrupeds to six feet tall bipeds. Also, their sensitivity to light seems to increase. Early on they all come out in the twilight as the suns pass behind the neighbouring planet's ring. Later they are warded off with bottles of faintly luminous grubs, though for some reason they have no problem running directly into torchlight.
Vin Diesel is just too resilient. He has no trouble running through the pitch darkness in an alien warzone pulling 140kg of power cells behind him and even wrestles with an alien and kills it (one of the bigger ones, not the starfish/bats).
These are the only problems I can see in the film, some people have complained about the dialogue, this is something that always irritates me as I feel that it's more realistic if characters don't have an ingenious catch phrase for any eventuality. People say dumb things in real life.
Overall, I though this film was very good delivering suspense, some decent action and incredible (but restrained) effects for the relatively low budget. Most of the characters were a little cliched, but they seemed fairly credible to me (face it, spaceships need pilots, equal opportunities will dictate there is a fairly good chance of them being female and most people don't like to leave others to die on alien infested hell planets). I was impressed that the Englishman lasted so long, I was tipping him for an early end, probably jumping down a dark hole after a particularly expensive Chardonnay. Apparently the characters were "irritating", so I must have missed a crucial character-building moment when I went to answer the door.
Apart from the points above I can't fault this film. You don't get much good scfi around these days but this is a highly respectable addition to the genre.
8/10