Pretty Good!

Rating: 8/10 (20 September 2006)

Once you add up all the happy (or unhappy) coincidences needed to make the plot of this film work it falls over. But it pelts you along at such a pace that you don't notice! Excellent pop-corn scif-fi, intelligent enough to keep sciffy fans happy and enough action to please everyone else. Different look, too! And Vin Diesel is very good in this. I haven't seen anything else with him in it that I like, but here he is very much in his element.
The characters are really perfectly written and portrayed, the special effects are in fact fairly cheaply done but but also very creatively, and the slightly moth-eaten-ness of everything actually contributes to ambiance of the movie.
There's been talk about the physical laws being violated in the solar system this movie is portrayed in - there aren't any violations that I can see. The story is set on the moon of a ringed gas giant which is orbiting a star which is in a binary system with... another, smaller binary system. Binary systems are commonplace, as are gas giants with moons and suns with interesting orbital resonances leading to grand alignments and complex eclipses. Just because the orrery takes the planet as the fixed frame of reference (which is probably what you'd have to do anyway to represent such a system) doesn't mean any laws are being violated. In fact, the cosmology in this movie is really GOOD... OK... Enough cosmology...
The monsters are great! Convincing, scary dumb beasties a bit like sharks and a bit like bats and a bit like snakes and a bit like pterodactyls...
The plot collapses under scrutiny, but not through badly thought-through character motivation or twists that make no sense, nobody does anything *unbelievably* stupid, by which I mean everyone's behaviour is logically explicable and can be related to. It's the weight of all the coincidences that causes the collapse, but that's okay, the movie's exciting enough that you don't care.
It probably doesn't carry repeat viewing, I'd guess...
8 stars! 2 for Vin diesel, 1 for the sheer coolness of a story set on an interesting and physically possible solar system, 1 for the rest of the characters, all of whom are excellent, 1 for the fast and furious plot, 1 for the beasties and a whopping 2 for that lovely shot of the the suns going down behind the gas giant in the middle of the movie...
WOW... that was pretty...