Prometheus Trap |
USA • 2012 • 89m •
  • Directed by: Andrew Bellware. • Starring: Michael Shattner, Rebecca Kush, Andrew J. Langton, James Edward Becton, Kate Britton, Sarah-Doe Osborne..     A space crew is diverted from their course and awakened to investigate a missing cargo vessel carrying a devastating time weapon. A fracture in time has trapped the missing ship, weapon, surviving crew members and rescuers in a repeating time loop. Only the 2 androids can retain memories of previous time loops while their respective crews exhibit unusual behaviors. The androids struggle to solve the illogic of their crews oblivious entrapment in an endless cycle of death and destruction.
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Review:
This is a "Groundhog day" type of plot in space where a sleeping crew is diverted to investigate a missing space ship to retrieve a mass destruction time weapon intended to wipe out a planet from time... namely earth (based on what I gathered from the female engineers motive).
The main problem with this movie is the poor audio quality. It is difficult to determine what is being said by anyone or anything. Lacking subtitles or closed captioning, there is no way to supplement the inability to hear the muddy dialogue.
It is also difficult to realize some crew are not human until the second android is found. It is nearly impossible to discern the physical location of the characters with the fog machines & odd camera angles which often cut off their heads, bodies and entire crew members.
The identical wigs on the females & android also makes it extremely difficult to separate them.
Too many tight shots at weird angles such as a 45 degree from floor level to ceiling & often not squared nor level; make it nearly impossible to follow their trek through the ship. Hence, impossible to understand their progression, location & purpose or accomplishments in the story. By adding fog & bright lights behind the fog and cast, it obscures the scenes even worse.
This director & camera crew clearly did not understand the impact of bright lights targeted at the cameras & how it affects the lighting levels & quality of the imagery. Bright lights will cause any auto leveling camera features to close down the lens apertures or iris & darken the faces. It also causes glare artifacts & reflections in the anamorphic lenses. Even worse are the bright uniform & background panel lights which glare in tight shots.
The Camera work is quite awful & continuously cuts off the top of their heads in every scene while the blinding shoulder lights on the uniform Epilets distort the light & color levels in each shot. Only a grade school child would frame a face between the chin & eyebrows or cut off the top of the heads in every shot regardless of subject framing distance.
Too many film crews are using nose hair closeups these days with no clue as to lighting. They spend a fortune on set design but we never get to see any of it due to the nose closeups. Doesn't anyone have professional training on cameras & lighting anymore?
As for the story, it wasn't bad. It could have been better if we could have heard the dialogue. As with Groundhog day, the events would restart each time they died & the events were slightly modifiable each time. At the final ending, it appeared the time weapon was the only survivor which halted the cycle. But it still wasn't fully clear whether the others were elsewhere or removed from existence or time or simply destroyed. It appears that the crew was killed by the female android & the weapon saved & ready for instructions for its next target. Difficult to be certain with so many film problems.
The movie could have been quite good with more funding for a better quality crew, cast & direction. Also quite viable as an excellent Outer Limits episode. They should bring back the series for clever episode plots like this.
Review by midge56 from Texas from the Internet Movie Database.
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