I saw this in the theater when it came out in 2000. at that time, the studio obviously knew it had a stink bomb on its hands, and released it without showing it to the critics first.
The plot line is that a medical ship responds to a distress call from an abandoned mining colony on a rogue moon that is about to fall into a supernova. Okay, works well enough. For some reason, the ship barely has enough working life-tubes to protect the entire crew from a hyperspace jump (which begs the question, how would they ever get patients back to where they are going.)
After killing their captain, played by veteran actor Robert Forster, the recovering drug addict pilot played by James Spader takes over. After some needless sex scenes between Spader and a perpetually angry looking Angela Bassett, and even more needless sex scenes between Robin Tunny and Lou Diamond Philips, they rescue the lone survivor of a team that was scavenging the moon. Yes, this ship has zero gravity rooms on the sides that seem to provide no other function than giving characters a place to have sex in zero gravity.
We discover that this survivor has found an alien artifact that looks like a giant sex toy, and is apparently the casing for a ninth-dimensional matter designed to destroy our universe. Meanwhile, it grants super powers to the survivor, who proceeds to go into Jason Vorhees mode and kill the rest of the crew.
Now, if you watch the deleted scenes on the DVD, you can see that the writer/director had a very different film in mind. Probably a "director's" cut would make a little more sense, but not much. It has a lot of science fiction conventions (like the life tubes and a huge ship with a small crew) that make little or no sense. It also contains clichés like a malfunctioning android and a computer with a quirky personality, which are more annoying than helpful.
The worst, of course, is the acting. One can only conclude that the actors realized fairly early on that this was going to be crap, and started phoning it in. Bassett is the worst of the lot, and I've seen her put in better performances in much cheaper movies.
Even the trailer is instructive, as it tried to almost portray the movie as a light comedy which it clearly wasn't, scoring it with music that didn't belong in the film...
Perhaps when they do the director's cut, they will explain how bad they screwed it up...
The plot line is that a medical ship responds to a distress call from an abandoned mining colony on a rogue moon that is about to fall into a supernova. Okay, works well enough. For some reason, the ship barely has enough working life-tubes to protect the entire crew from a hyperspace jump (which begs the question, how would they ever get patients back to where they are going.)
After killing their captain, played by veteran actor Robert Forster, the recovering drug addict pilot played by James Spader takes over. After some needless sex scenes between Spader and a perpetually angry looking Angela Bassett, and even more needless sex scenes between Robin Tunny and Lou Diamond Philips, they rescue the lone survivor of a team that was scavenging the moon. Yes, this ship has zero gravity rooms on the sides that seem to provide no other function than giving characters a place to have sex in zero gravity.
We discover that this survivor has found an alien artifact that looks like a giant sex toy, and is apparently the casing for a ninth-dimensional matter designed to destroy our universe. Meanwhile, it grants super powers to the survivor, who proceeds to go into Jason Vorhees mode and kill the rest of the crew.
Now, if you watch the deleted scenes on the DVD, you can see that the writer/director had a very different film in mind. Probably a "director's" cut would make a little more sense, but not much. It has a lot of science fiction conventions (like the life tubes and a huge ship with a small crew) that make little or no sense. It also contains clichés like a malfunctioning android and a computer with a quirky personality, which are more annoying than helpful.
The worst, of course, is the acting. One can only conclude that the actors realized fairly early on that this was going to be crap, and started phoning it in. Bassett is the worst of the lot, and I've seen her put in better performances in much cheaper movies.
Even the trailer is instructive, as it tried to almost portray the movie as a light comedy which it clearly wasn't, scoring it with music that didn't belong in the film...
Perhaps when they do the director's cut, they will explain how bad they screwed it up...