Great production design; uninteresting plot

Rating: 6/10 (27 February 2000)

We haven't seen a really fine sci-fi flick in the better part of a year (since THE MATRIX [1999]), so my expectations were rather high for this one. After all, one of my sci-fi faves, THE ARRIVAL (1996), was made by the same director. While the cinematography and production design are excellent and even plow new fields of creativity, the all-important plot is just a monsters-in-the-dark rehash. The skillful editing gives the film a nice artistic edge, but sometimes it is so jumpy that it is impossible to follow what is going on. Still, the crash scene at the beginning of the film is outstanding, perhaps the best crash scene in sci-fi cinema to date, the relatively low budget notwithstanding.
The film flirts with scientific plausibility, but deviances therefrom are jarring. For one thing, an eclipsing gas giant would not be dark against a bright sky. Since the brightness of the sky is a nearby phenomenon due to light scattering by the atmosphere, all you would see of the eclipsing object, if anything, would be a thin crescent, and perhaps some highlights from the rings, as slightly brighter structures against the sky. From a biologist's standpoint, the ecology of a planet that supports a substantial biomass of large predators with little or no vegetation makes no sense. Doesn't anyone ever think about these things?