2036: Unknown Origin -- a review

Katee Sackhoff is a goddess.

There, I’ve said it. I freely admit to being a huge fan of this actress, whom I first came across in the Battlestar Galactica reboot that aired on the Sy-Fy Channel (back when it was more appropriately known as the Sci-Fi Channel). Her performance as a gender-changed Starbuck was superb; she brought such humanity and depth to a character that could very easily have been very one-note. After Battlestar Galactica ended, I followed Sackhoff’s career, watching her go on to play deputy sheriff Victoria ‘Vic’ Moretti on the enjoyable Longmire, and as the rascally Amunet Black on the most recent season of The Flash.

And that was why I happily settled down to watch Katee in the recently released 2036: Origin Unknown. A science fiction opus, 2036: Origin Unknown deals with a manned mission to Mars that goes horribly wrong. But this isn’t the mission that Katee’s character is on; instead, her father was aboard the doomed ship that crashed without warning, with the cause of its destruction remaining a mystery. Sackhoff’s character, Mackenzie “Mack” Wilson, is in charge of the follow up mission to Mars, and this one also develops problems right out of the gate.

Sackhoff gives it her all, doing a good job at playing a woman who’s under a great deal of pressure to find out what happened to her father, as well as the rest of the doomed Mars expedition, while wild and weird stuff starts happening around her, including a mouthy robot that must be a charter member of the HAL 9000 fan club. But the real problem here is the production values, or the lack thereof. 2036: Origin Unknown looks very cheap, with the entire movie taking place in one setting: the mission control room on Earth.

If you’ve seen footage of the real mission control from actual space missions, you know it’s a pretty crowded, busy place. But thanks to the extremely low budget of 2036: OU, Sackhoff holds court all by herself in a small room with an obnoxious robot making trouble for her. Events taking place outside the control room are handled with really cheap-looking CGI effects. And while the script tries to be big-minded, ultimately tackling grand science fiction themes that might make Stanley Kubrick and Arthur C. Clarke proud, it all falls short because 2036 just mishandles these story elements very badly.

But despite the fact that her latest film is a let down, I still admire Katee Sackhoff as an actress. She’s already moved onto her next project, an SF TV series for Netflix called Another Life that definitely sounds more promising (at least with Netflix involved they’ll have a decent budget). I’m looking forward to it—but then, I’m looking forward to anything that Katee does, anyway. --SF

Comments

Explorer From Another World

It’s Friday night during the summer in Beutter county, an idyllic farming community in Indiana, and the good folks are settling in for what should be another humdinger of an evening. Until their plans are shattered by the arrival of an Explorer From Another World! This turns out to be an alien (Gemma Sterling) who starts savagely killing people from the moment it disembarks from its flying saucer. Local kids Eddie (Colin McCorquodale), Marybeth (Sage Marchand) and Culpepper (Nolan Gay) are planning on seeing a movie, but it looks like they’ll be battling for the very survival of the human race instead! Explorer From Another World is a wonderfully done throwback to the B-movies of the 1950s and 1960s. Ably directed by Woody Edwards (who gives himself a small cameo as Hank in the sheriff’s jail cell), the film is forty five minutes long, but manages to tell its torrid but funny story very effectively in the time allotted. And the short running time tracks when you...

Logan's Run -- a review

I first saw Logan’s Run in a New Jersey movie theater fifty years ago, when I was a boy. The theater, somewhere in the suburban wilds of the Garden State, was packed to the gills with people. I wasn’t sure what to expect with the movie back then—all I cared about that it was a brand new science fiction film, in an age when big budget SF properties on both TV and the big screen was very rare (of course, Star Wars , which would be released the very next year, would change all of that). Based on the 1967 novel of the same name by William F. Nolan and George Clayton Johnson, Logan’s Run is a futuristic tale about a man named Logan 5 (Michael York) who has a special job in a place filled with hedonistic leisure. Logan lives within the splendor of a Utopian society whose population dwells within large domes. The interior is presented as a vast, upscale shopping mall where its citizens want for nothing. Every need, every whim, and every fantasy is met. Of course, there’s a catc...

The Conjuring: Last Rites

Whether you believe in the “true” exploits of demonologists Ed & Lorraine Warren or not (I don’t), The Conjuring series of films, based on their “true” stories, have all been very entertaining, with everything now supposedly coming to an end with The Conjuring: Last Rites . After a prologue in 1964, where we witness the traumatic birth of the Warren’s daughter, Judy, the rest of the movie advances to 1986, with the Warrens now somewhat retired. They’re still speaking at colleges, before giggly students who crack Ghostbusters jokes at them, but the Warrens have ceased personally investigating creepy cases on their own. That is, until their good friend Father Gordon (Steve Coulter) winds up hanging from a noose, thanks to a demonic attack. Father Gordon had been trying to get the Warrens to investigate the case of the Smurls--a family in Pennsylvania who are suffering through a severe haunting in their house, and when the Warrens finally do get involved, the demons come...

The View From The Mountain

Search This Blog