Stranded |
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Canada / UK • 2013 • 84m •
   • Directed by: Roger Christian. • Starring: Christian Slater, Amy Matysio, Michael Therriault, Brendan Fehr, Ryland Alexander, Lyndon Bray, Mark D. Claxton. • Music by: Todd Bryanton.      When four astronauts on board the Ark moonbase are unexpectedly struck by a series of meteor blasts, Colonel Gerard Brauchman and his crew work to stabilize the base. After removing a stray meteor from the carbon dioxide filter, they realize the spores on the meteor have the ability to replicate cell structure, reproduce and mutate. Fascinated by the meteor's uncanny ability to replicate, the crew believes they have just discovered a scientific phenomenon. But have they? Soon afterwards, the crew begins to realize they are not alone. The presence on board begins to target each of them, leaving those remaining to destroy it before all are killed.
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Review:
I'd like to first start by saying that the music used throughout the movie was nice and a good job was done there. As for the acting, from all the actors they did and acted their parts very well. However, I don't know if it was the writingdialog or what, but the dialog seemed very rough at times and for some reason I couldn't settle into this movie. At times the characters were overly dumb and made even dumber actions. Like a heavy amount of it all seemed forced somehow.
The movie starts off with a group of people on a small moon base, a meteor shower knocks out comms, oxygen and power - pretty much the whole station. As the team starts to do repairs, one of the team members retrieves a small chunk of the meteor, which contained spores that were capable of rapid growth and mutation with very little resources. One of them gets infected (the only female of the crew) and it causes her to somehow get pregnant and give birth to a monster. But now I'm spoiling it without telling you's what was wrong with it all. For the entire time that the oxygen system is damaged and in the process of being repaired - which is like for half or more of the movie, the doctor on station warns the rest of his 3 crewmen that carbon poisoning has all these side effects like hallucinations, hearing noises, paranoia, yada yada. And you think this is going to be a cabin fever movie which I think it would have done better as.
What made it hard to watch was the fact that even with none of the crew exhibiting symptoms yet, none of them trusted each other. The lack of surveillance - sorry, screw this review. The point is that it played a lot like paranormal in which no one realizes what is going on before its too late and no one trusted each other even though they were all friendly crew-mates. There was a part in the movie where Slater had a chance to engage the enemy using his star trek-like pistol weapon and instead they just sort of run past him or something, there were too many lazy camera tricks and cuts to try and make it work. but time and time again the crew split up for no reason. With all the advanced technology you would think that there would be more precautionary measures put into place.
Also I am at all no expert but I think it'd take about 8 hours to get to the moon or vise versa to earth. The escape pod (containing the bad guy) did it in ten minutes, so that when the good guys were able to warn them it was already too late. Also the good guys were rescued about 30 minutes after the bad guy launched. There is just no way and maybe a spaceship would contain that technology, but not an escape pod which was very tiny. Win or lose, the ending was not at all satisfying.
I don't like mentioning other movies too much because its not good to compare but if you want to spend time on a better written movie check out 'Moon (2009)' or I dare even say 'Sunshine (2007)'. It's not a money issue, the effects in Stranded were good, but not the story. It just felt like a very long unfinished episode of X-Files. The actors did what they could with their roles, the acting was good, but the story was just a flop or maybe a good concept but wasn't executed well enough. I feel like its lacking somehow and I just can't put my finger on it.
Overall: I wouldn't recommend it, but I wouldn't try to stop you from watching it, it's a bit of time waster that feels more like a waste of time, if you know what I mean. It's always nice to see movies about the moon and space. Do I regret watching this, not completely as I was more interested on how things might work one day, the concept is pretty much the only thing that kept me in my seat. But there are a ton of other movies that show more on space travel concepts and extraterrestrial bases. 'Solaris' was interesting, it's been a while. I might go watch that or tell others to, instead of this.
I hate to see movies that were made and where people showed up and money was spent and the movie just turns out crappy. It played more like a well funded late night reject off the sci-fi channel.
Review by pjr235 from the Internet Movie Database.
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