Infini

like Alien, but you never understand what the other life form is trying to achieve:)

What starts off as a pure "Aliens" ripoff gradually turns into something quite different, as Abbess wants a story with more heart than guns, and refuses to let his roughnecks turn into killing machines. But doing subjective reality on screen is tough, and the plot - which could basically have made a decent Doctor Who script - isn't quite thick enough to last 110 minutes.

The obvious, ahem, 'influences' are ALIEN, THE THING and increasingly SOLARIS, but maybe also THE SIGNAL (2007), for moments of people becoming erratic and relating to one another in ways not merely violent, struggling to connect to reality but finding a stable orientation distinctly elusive. So not without ambition and not badly done.

A combination of System Shock (without the AI) and The Thing. It's not as good as those properties, but it's a decent film with a great ending.

I think a huge chunk of the movie is kind of divagation and running around in circles. It would have benefited a lot from holding the paranoia and state of not knowing longer, because, as it was, you kind of lose the tension right in the middle of things and trudge along with less worry to know how it ends. The data part of the slipstream left one thinking it was a code corruption, and that would have been interesting to work with instead.

After establishing a kind of high-energy ALIENS vibe, the writer borrows heavily from THE THING but without really doing anything much with it. A scene that seemed to be inspired by the difficulties of two guys on acid trying to make a decision was amusing, but the moment at the end where the things hold up the photo was a very corny way to bring proceedings to a conclusion. All of the explanation about slipstreaming, involving being turned into data and time dilation, proved totally irrelevant.

Give a couple of high-school kids a camera and moderately expensive sets and then tell the actors to behave crazy on a sliding scale and the result would be this movie. The plot is bad and seems largely made up on the spot. All the characters are introduced together and there is no sense of who they are until right near the end. Even then I didn't care. All the time dilation malarkey has no bearing on events. The third act is also far too slow when it should have been intense.

I enjoyed the visual and conceptual sci-fi elements of this offering, but didn't think much of the horror side of things, and the whole thing seems rather familiar to other better films.

Incomprehensible tosh

In space you're in trouble when crazy space snot gets inside your head...

This Aussie Sci-Fi looked okay and the acting fine. Was mainly the structure which kept this from becoming a thrill. After a chaotic start and a slower portion following nearly putting one to sleep, this one recovered fairly well the last act when paranoia kicked in. Never a super Sci-Fi'er, but turned out better then first feared.