Who payed the critics

Boring

Best movie of this year hands down!

It's a feast for the eyes. But what really makes this dramedy work is the acting.

By 2038, the Earth's natural resources have been depleted; valuable minerals are now being mined on distant moons in the depths of space. With their mines repeatedly coming under attack from rival company Pyrite, Galactic Mining send a group of convicted criminals and computer whizz kids to Moon 44, to train as fighter pilots and navigators. Tough internal affairs cop Stone (Michael Paré) goes undercover with the prisoners to try and find out why the company's mining shuttles have been mysteriously disappearing.Six years before he scored a massive worldwide hit with alien invasion blockbuster Independence Day, Roland Emmerich helmed Moon 44, an extremely lacklustre sci-fi thriller that saw the director desperately attempting to imbue his film with a sense of style by ripping off the look and feel of Ridley Scott's classics Alien and Bladerunner. However, some reasonable model effects, and an excess of fluorescent lighting, spurting steam vents, and slowly rotating ventilation fans do little to hide the fact that this is one hell of a dull film, with dreadful performances, terrible dialogue, unexciting action sequences, and characters that it's very difficult to give a damn about.Interestingly, it was shortly after appearing in this film that Stephen Geoffreys, who plays Moon 44's drug-dealer Cookie, left mainstream cinema to carve out a career in gay porn, making one wonder whether he found appearing in that kind of film less embarrassing than being in really bad sci-fi flicks like this one.

This is a stylish looking movie, with moody lighting and atmospheric industrial sets. The space ships are cool - though why the good guys only have helicopters is a puzzle. The characters are likable enough but some are out-of-the-box Hollywood cutouts. The actors are either almost famous, or look hauntingly like people who are - I spent a lot of time wondering if I had seen them before (I hadn't it turns out). The story is OK, however there are a few plot glitches, and at times the story line is a bit thin. There are no real surprises - and no moral ambiguity. The dialogue is OK but once or twice stinks so bad you'll cringe (it may have been an attempt at humour?). At least there are no sudden swerves into the horror genre, and no completely unexplainable plot twists (as in Sunshine for instance).If you like sci-fi anyway you probably be forgiving enough to enjoy this. I got the DVD for £1 at Tescos so I feel I got my money's worth.

It's never a good sign when the DVD costs just £1 and comes in one of those very thin cases. Neither is it when there's just the bald title printed on the disc and there's no additional material. Still; we live in hope...Well; what you see is what you get. Don't be fooled by Roland Emerich's name amongst the credits; this is truly a C-movie.The plot goes something like this. Uninhabited worlds in deep space are being mined for minerals. The stuff is then taken away in shuttle-craft to planetary processing plants. This makes the shuttles extremely valuable and somebody is hijacking them. An undercover cop is sent to find out what's going on, by joining a prison-team at the next world most likely to be targeted. That's 'Moon 44'.Like so many of these cheap (and not so cheap) movies, money seems to have been saved by not employing a lighting facility. And everything happens in an often barely discernible gloom - even indoors. The twilight never lifts from the beginning to end, making for an extremely dull and claustrophobic experience. Actors are almost all B or C-list and they are doomed to struggle with a script that might be politely described as lacking intelligence. Even the 'big catch' of an ageing Malcolm Macdowell from 'A Clockwork Orange' fame, fails to illuminate either the set or the script.There's so many silly things going on as regards the plot that it sometimes appears as if children had drafted it. Macdowell's the boss/baddie on the moon, but we never know who he's working for. It's clearly not himself as there's a big battle-cruiser turns up to launch an attack on the moon. Where from? Who's in it? Where does it go? Who cares - clearly not Mr Emmerich. Criminals are sent as defence pilots. They fly helicopters along smoke-filled canyons. Why? why not gain altitude and be a helluva lot safer? Weapons systems are actually more primitive than those available today. Apaches (attack helicopters) employ 8 'Hellfire' guided missiles with a range of up to 5 miles. These defenders didn't engage the enemy within 1000 yards.On top of all this, there's a testosterone-sodden bi-line about these violent scum-of-the-earth criminals (who are yet still exceptional enough to be qualified helicopter pilots) that makes 'Shawshank' seem like a holiday-camp. This is needlessly emphasised by a shower-scene rape. Ironically, the rapist chooses to rape his land-based navigator, the one man upon whom he will have to depend in the foggy valleys, and it never occurs to him that this geezer might take revenge. Yes.Bought as a piece of cheap Friday-night throwaway hokum, it was in the charity shop by Saturday afternoon.

It's 2038 the planet earth is out of national resources, but there's a whole asteroid belt of deserted, lifeless rocks from which all the world's resources can be drawn. But the planet earth has also split into various corporations instead of nations who are fighting for control of those asteroids. In fact one company is down to only one asteroid, the last stand will be made on Moon 44.You know if you're expecting a serious study on earth's dwindling resources and what I personally think will eventually happen, the strip mining of dead worlds for resources, Moon 44 ain't the film for you. What we did get in between the giggles and the video game special effects was one of the great homo-erotic science fiction films of all time.The defense craft are these helicopter type ships that only crazy people like prisoners will fly in exchange for commutation of sentence. They are navigated from the asteroid by these computer geek types. Pilot and navigator of necessity have to work together to fly these things. But the brawny prisoners and they are all brawny believe me have other ideas about bonding with these twinks from space.Michael Pare is an internal affairs agent for the company going in undercover as a prisoner. Dean Devlin is the head twink, you don't really think he would be teamed with a hardened lifer did you?Actors trained in the classics like Roscoe Lee Browne and Malcolm McDowell do the lines like they pearls from the Bard and they do it well. Might be some of the best acting these two gentlemen have ever done on screen. We never see these villains, all we know is that they're not aliens just greedier humans than who Pare is working for. Or who is exactly working for who?If you care to watch and get a few laughs, tune this monstrosity in.