below average sci-fi

Rating: Null/10 (1 March 2002)

I saw this on wide screen TV. It is a pretty average, or just below average sci-fi. The fact is, it has nothing new to offer and a combination of dinosaur movies and sci-fi flick with poor characters.
***spoliers ahead****
Among the flaws, what immediately depressed me was the ordinariness of the planet (looks like earth), with breathable air and a deserted colony with drinking water and food and a truck all ready and waiting, within walking distance of the crash site. A far cry from, say, Red Planet where an alien landscape was painstakingly presented. The adventurers face only one problem, to cope with the monster creatures which come out during the utterly dark eclipse period (which coincidentally happens exactly when they crash) and are scared of light. The creatures are also typical Alien or Jurassic park rip-off's, looking like pterodactyls and dinosaurs. Sci-fi is really scraping the bottom of the alien barrel - cant they come up with something new?
Many of the scenes are simply not convincing, like the one where bottled glow-worms are used to scare off the creatures...jeeez you can barely see their glow. In a planet brilliantly lit with 3 suns, I thought creatures having such an adverse reaction to even feeble light could not exist in the
first place. The characters are also generally pointless and shallow, with the typical Hollywood trend of glorifying serial killers as keen intellectuals.
This movie could have been better made as a thriller set on Earth without the sci-fi angle and avoided many flaws. Plenty of hostile deserts and isolated islands here to make the same plot with stranded travellers.
Rating 6/10