Solar Crisis [1992] [DVD]

Well obviously I do have to say more to fill this space, I'd never heard of this film and got suckered in by the 70's looking cover, An unknown Charlton Heston sci fi classic,, , , no!. This is a low budget affair and commits a fault a lot of low budget films make, namely to put too much of a plot in. The basic plot of a mission to the sun to prevent a solar flare from burning the earth, fine thats enough. But the had to add a government plan to thwart the mission which I could never quite figure out, a mole in the crew and a search on earth for the captians missing son, too much, add to that simply the worst dialog I've ever heard. Truely truely dreadful, please don't waste hours of your life watching this when you could be watching paint dry.

The world is facing imminent destruction and a suicide mission is sent to the Sun to avert catastrophe by firing a bomb into its fiery heart: yes, it's Solar Crisis, aka Crisis 2050, which burned up a huge chunk of change that's never apparent on screen back in 1990 and returned barely enough to buy a Happy Meal for each of the cast in Japan before going straight to video (remember them?) in the re-edited version presented here that's credited to one Alan Smithee. The plot hook's pretty much the same as Sunshine - suicide mission to the Sun, saboteur on board, logic cast adrift - except that this time they're not trying to reignite the sun but to prematurely detonate a solar flare before it can reach Earth. With a talking bomb. Voiced by Paul Williams. Who wants to be promoted so the crew will take him more seriously...

Given that the cast also includes Jack Palance at his most dementedly OTT, Charlton Heston at his most rigid, top-liner Tim Matheson at his most anonymous, the original Hills Have Eyes' unforgettable Michael Berryman (you may not remember the name, but you DO remember that face) and Peter Boyle as the industrialist out to sabotage the mission because, er, if it succeeds the world will be saved but his share price will go down, you'd expect if not a laugh-a-minute at least a laugh every reel. No joy. This is the worst kind of bad movie: a boring one. The fate of the world may be hanging in the balance but the whole film is shot with a complete lack of urgency or momentum at the same unvarying deadly slow pace. There's low-key and there's walking through it, but here the cast don't even do that. Instead, they just stand still looking at screens in near darkness for most of the time. You keep on hoping for Paul Williams' talking bomb to suffer an existential crisis, but instead the film just... stands there, doing next to nothing. Literally. This is one of the most inert movies ever made - so inert that if Clive Owen had been cast, he'd almost have looked lively by comparison. Even a poorly explained suicidal repair attempt fails to raise a fritter of interest since it mostly involves, yep, the cast just standing still looking at screens in near darkness. Even when the bomb prematurely goes into countdown before being launched they deal with the new crisis by... standing still looking at screens in near darkness as if they had all the time in the world. Merchant-Ivory films have better action scenes.

Things aren't much livelier down on Earth where the movie spends most of it's running time with Matheson's son/Chuck's grandson Corin Nemec trying to hitch a ride to the spaceport across an arid landscape with Palance's insane desert artist "looking for that note out there while the chicks still dig me" while waylaid by rejects from a Mad Max ripoff and evil corporate suits who track him down so they can... release him on a nice beach. Just don't expect logic, if you haven't already guessed that much. Best moment? A ditzy girl in a bar describing Jack Palance as "An old guy with white hair and a face like rotting leather," though Chucky Baby taking out the villain's aircraft with a bazooka fired from the hip from an office window or beating up a barfly who likes his beret are welcome morsels of camp in a film that for 99% of it's running time offers a whole lot of nuttin'. Richard C. Sarafian's slightly longer original cut that played in Japan offers an additional six minutes but cries out to be cut down to a more manageable 17 minutes: the director of Vanishing Point must have thanked his lucky stars when this re-edit gave him an excuse to take his name off the film. A film so bad it's not good, and painfully unfunny with it.

Prism's DVD isn't even a good presentation of the cut 'Alan Smithee' version - while the film was shot in 2.35:1 widescreen, it's been cropped to fullscreen here.

Director: Alan Smithee

Alan Smithee is the name used for the Director of a film where the real Director does not wish his name to be associated with it. In other words he thinks the film is so bad he does not want to own up to directing it.