Strong and Moving!

Slow pace in the most part of the movie.

A movie that not only functions as a solid scarefest but a razor-sharp satire.

By the time the dramatic fireworks start popping off, each one feels earned.

Cameron, Cameron, Cameron. Here is yet another example of the spiral downward of your career, which ended with the fantastic horror that is Space Mutiny. Here you play an overacting chief of a quasi-Nazi state on a parallel Earth. This made for t.v. movie(which is simply the pilot shows of a never got made t.v. show-gee, I wonder why this one never went into production?)highlights your mediocre acting skills perfectly.The plot, such as it is, is that some astronauts from Earth crash land on an identical world that circles the sun parallel to ours. The other two astronauts are killed, and the 'perfect order' that runs the world in a 1984-esque fashion tries to find out all the info they can from the remaining astronaut, Neal Stryker. He escapes from the special hospital where he's being kept so easily that it made you wonder if all the hospital staff had been lobotomized or something. Then he wanders around trying to find out where he is and what happened, nearly giving himself away over and over again. One of the things that almost gets him is that everyone on the planet is left-handed(the opposite of Earth, nudge nudge, wink, wink). He meets up with a female doctor who already betrayed him in the hospital, and forces her to take him to a weird old guy who thinks his pigs are spies for the Perfect Order. Now that's a quality guerrilla fighter, to be sure. This old guy tries to help him steal a spaceship so that he can get back to Earth, but for some strange reason the plan doesn't work. Can't imagine why not, really, especially since their most dangerous enemy is Cameron Mitchell. It should have been a cake walk. At the end of the pilot...errr...movie, Stryker is stranded on the planet with nowhere to go. Much like the t.v. series itself, in my opinion.

I actually had seen the last parts of this movie when I was a child. Thanks to the search feature of plots I was able to find out the name of it. For years I did not know the name, but the movie stuck in my mind. The ending left hope that the main character would get back to Earth eventually. It was a shame it did not make it to a series. This movie reminds me of Journey to The Far Side Of the Sun. Also known as Doppleganger. If you liked this feature the other one is worth a watch. It was done before The Stranger, but shares a similar plot. Yet different. I just picked up The Stranger off of eBay on VHS. Hope they make a DVD, but it is doubtful unless it comes out on Dollar DVD. A few pilots are making it on the budget DVD's and maybe this one will.

This movie takes the plot behind the sci-fi flick "Doppelganger" (an astronaut from our Earth crashing on a 'counter-Earth' on the opposite side of the Sun, and the Cold War totalitarian vibes on that world) and tries to turn it into a pilot for a TV series. However, the whole thing sank without a trace, and TV is probably better off for it.Everyone here is perfectly adequate in a 'made for TV' way. Cameron Mitchell turns in his usual solid performance. So does Glenn Corbett (who seems to be a kind of poor man's John Saxon) who plays the rugged individualist whose very existence poses a threat to the foundation of the 'World Order' on counter Earth.But the low budget and low energy and inconsistent script and the lack of any real imagination in the set designs and cinematography keep this Sci-Fi adventure firmly tethered on the launch pad.I'll give one example: in the original template for this pilot, ("Doppleganger"), the astronauts lose control of their landing vehicle in a thunderstorm, and crash their ship in a truly appalling sequence (it was obvious that their ship was never going to fly again). Then the two astronauts stagger helplessly from the smoking remains of their vehicle in the middle of howling rains and winds, only to be smacked down and overcome by faceless men yelling through loudspeakers.In "Stranded in Space", the astronauts are sitting in their seats when buzzers sound, things start shaking, and the camera blurs into a blackout (and as a friend pointed out, it was pretty obvious that the actors were simply shaking themselves on their seats, the director wasn't even shaking the camera or the set). I've seen episodes of "The Twilight Zone" and "The Outer Limits" that took more effort to establish mood and setting than this made-for-TV mediocrity.And that, in essence, is what's wrong with "Stranded In Space". No budget, no time, no imagination...just making the token gestures and hoping the sci-fi Fan Boys' imagination and enthusiasm will fill in the rest. Sorry, guys, it didn't work. I'm sure that everyone here just finished their work on this one and walked away, and never thought of it again, except as a listing on their C.V. And that's what you, the viewer will do. You'll remember, if pressed, that you once watched a TV movie called "Stranded In Space", but it made no lasting impression on you, and you can't recall too much about it.

The whole plot goes like this: An astronaut gets caught in a freak accident and lands up on some alternate earth where a Big Brother type government rules everything and controls everyone. The government, known as the Perfect Order, sends anyone who steps out of line to a place called Ward E, where they are treated pretty badly. Bad acting, predictable plotline and little to endear you to the cast makes this one a turkey.1984 does the same thing, only a lot better.