Part of the enjoyment that I took from this film stemmed from the fact that I knew nothing more about it than that it starred John Turturro and Emily Watson (2 reasons enough to watch), was a period piece and involved chess. Everything that evolved before me was completely unexpected. I shan't, therefore, give away much more. Suffice to say that Turturro is magnificent as an eccentric, obsessive and deeply vulnerable chess genius and Em matches him step for step as the strong-minded woman who is drawn to him. It's about love and obsession, rather than the venerated board game and after drawing me in gradually over the first half hour, became totally compelling. And I defy anyone to second-guess the ending.

I picked this title up from a friend who had it sitting in his exhaustive DVD/Video/Laserdisc collection, so luckily I didn't personally have to pay for it. I had an inkling that it would be a bad film, but I KNOW what a truly bad film is after watching greats like Children Shouldn't Play With Dead Things and The Incredibly Strange Creatures Who Stopped Living and Became Mixed-Up Zombies, and now there is truly nothing that fazes me unless it is astoundingly bad.
Solar Crisis is bad, but it doesn't reach that sweet spot of absolute pain that some movies are at.
Anyway, the general plot is that the sun is about to unleash a huge solar flare towards the earth that will essentially destroy it. In order to counter-act this imminent threat, humanity has assembled a spaceship and crew whose duty it is to fire an antimatter bomb (which the opening describes as "the biggest explosive ever") into the sun, which through some convoluted sci-fi logic will cause the flare to shoot out at a different angle, leaving earth unharmed.
Never mind that what I have just described to you sounds like a bad episode of the original Star Trek. Even with an ensemble cast (Charlton Heston, Peter Boyle, and Jack Palance), Solar Crisis can barely manage that level of mediocrity, thanks to a plot that starts simple, yet becomes increasingly nonsensical as time wears on.
The crowning achievement of this debacle of a movie is the addition of a villain character (played by Boyle) who insists on sabotaging the mission. Through means that are never explained, he sends an evil minion with an embarrassingly bad haircut to exercise some sort of vague electronic mind control over the space crew's genetically engineered scientist, played by female lead Annabel Schofield. Why is he sabotaging the mission? Because by his moronic viewpoint, he believes the flare won't happen and that when it doesn't, he will become fabulously wealthy because he has dug his evil claws into the stock market. In effect, you have a villain with the most absurdly stupid motivation imaginable.
The film's plot becomes amazingly convoluted and develops very slowly, in time tapping the use of characters who have only vague or uselessly brief roles in the storyline. I could sit here and explain in detail precisely what happens to demonstrate the sheer inability of the screenwriter to make a plot that actually clicks or holds your attention, but I am sitting here writing this review on Microsoft Word and I know for a fact that this would take three pages, and I would only succeed in losing your interest. But then again, you would probably get the same effect from watching the film.
Anyway, the film is miserably bogged down with exceedingly poor dialogue. Imagine if all that ever happened on the Star Trek Enterprise was that the characters spewed sci-fi jargon back and forth at each-other. Yes, I know, they already do that, but imagine if that's ALL they did, and that they used said jargon to set up vague and near-nonsensical scenes that produce no excitement, tension, or interest in the viewer whatsoever.
This is best exemplified at the point when a character in a Zero-G environment screws a bolt back onto a metal box before proceeding to cry in agony for a couple of minutes before suddenly exploding. The script alludes previously to the character risking an explosion, but doesn't bother to give any solid answer as to why or how this occurs, nor why he can't really escape. In totality, you have a sorry cross between the bizarre and the laughable.
Then we have several scenes where dramatic build-up leads to nothing. Jack Palance's performance is wasted on a character that serves only to drive the boy hero (don't ask) around the desert, before getting roughed up and killed by a bunch of suits. On his death-bed, Palance finally tells our boy hero his last name (while wearing a horrible bruised makeup job that makes it look like somebody put a balloon under his eyeball), which he kept quiet about before. Colonel Travis J. Richards. The boy repeats it quietly after he expires, giving viewers the impression that the name is of some significance later on in the film. Perhaps Charlton Heston's grizzled admiral character knows him and the plot will advance thereby once his name is repeated. Something. Anything.
Nope. Sorry. Any hopes you have will be dashed when this moment turns out only to be another of many pathetic, failed attempts at creating dramafor a character so flat and hackneyed that it will forever be a stain on Palance's career, just as those of the rest of the cast are similarly marred.
Completing the film is a painfully abrupt ending featuring Schofield piloting the bomb into the center of the sun in an effort to redeem her deeds while under the villain's spell, a climax which features another of the film's considerably well-done visual effects sequences that, even for the visibly elaborate care put into them, still always manage to make the film look just as chintzy as it really is. The saddest part about this film is the obviously large budget, tragically wasted on a stinker of a script and a supporting cast behind Boyle, Heston, and Palance that manage to nail the coffin shut with pure over-acting.
Grade: D-