Product: Solar Crisis (Region 2)
Rating: 2.0
Inept sci-fi
This flick posits the world facing a doomsday solar flare in the near future. Tim Matheson leads a cast of boring action figures to the edge of the sun, where he will pilot a smaller spaceship into the sun while carrying an anti-matter bomb - what amounts to a suicide mission. (The science of solar flares theorizes that they form based on magnetic lines that work like rubber bands; the bomb will snap the lines and prevent the lethal flare from forming.) Meanwhile, Matheson's son escapes from his military school, and Matheson's disapproving father - Charlton Heston as an uptight career military man - sets out to find him. The flare is preceded by other solar phenomenon that's steaming up the earth (and interfering with anything that relies on basic principles of electromagnetism). While the mission must succeed for the sake of humanity, a sinister tycoon played by Peter Boyle is determined to sabotage it.Nothing in this flick works - least of all why Boyle is set on sinking a mission that's clearly mankind's last hope (doubts over whether it may be worse than the flare or at least uneccessary seem to have been left out of the script). The plot about Matheson's son seems entirely uneccessary, even if it does allow for the obligatory showdown between Heston & Boyle. Lastly, what is the state of technology here? It looks like the near future (with concept versions of today's space and aircraft), but also with holograms and nearly sentient AI - embodied in a luscious fembot and the antimatter bomb's computer (voiced effectively by Paul Williams). "Crisis" rode the crest of early 1990's CGI (a path blazed by the new Trek show) in which then nifty effects made drama obsolete. Now its effects look dated, and the story remains as incomprehensible as before.