For me, there are never enough good sci-fi films, but unfortunately, many that are made, are poor quality B-movies. With the dearth of quality films about, you end up trying some that from the initial trailer, look potentially ok, but are probably bad; this is the B-movie gamble! Scavengers (aka Space Soldiers) is one such film, where things I’ve read online indicated it might not be of the highest merit, acting or effects wise, but it does have Sean Patrick Flanery (Young Indiana Jones and soon to be in Dexter), Roark Critchlow (V) and Jeremy London (Mallrats) in it, so maybe these articles were wrong. Either way, in my need for a sci-fi fix, I thought I’d give it a go.
Was this a wise course of action?
The ‘Revelator’ is a scavenger ship, crewed by the usual bunch of misfits and sci-fi archetypes, whose job is to turn up at the scene of space battles, or abandoned planets and salvage anything they can. As the film opens, the crew have just arrived at a still ongoing battle, following a highly unusual energy signature, which they intend to trace. The captain of this merry band, Wake (Roark Critchlow), dives into the fray early, against protocol (because he’s just so headstrong and self-assured obviously), just as two other ships appear. One of these ships is a rival scavenger ship, which is quickly dispatched by the other, more mysterious vessel. While the mystery ship is distracted by the rival scavenger, Wake boards an alien craft and takes the artefact that is emitting the unusual energy reading. It is then revealed that the mystery ship is captained by none other than his old enemy Jekel (Sean Patrick Flanery), who is also after the same artefact, and who reveals it is the ‘Chaos Generator’ (aka ‘Alien MacGuffin’). A chase across space, with the fate of the universe at stake, then ensues.
As you can see from the synopsis above, it is not ground breaking in any way, and I am not sure quite where to start with this film, but it is a mixed bag to say the least. One thing that I have taken into account, however, is that it is a low budget production and have tempered expectations accordingly.
Plot wise, we are in very standard territory, with it basically being a ‘hunt the MacGuffin’ race between two ‘old enemies with history’. While that in itself isn’t a problem, there are only one or two interesting touches brought to it, and it hasn’t been fleshed out more than the usual fare. Motivations, back-story and character depth are all at a minimum and we really never get to explore the world that has been put before us.
As previously mentioned, there are a few known names in this, and they each come out of this looking a bit worse for wear, although some do better than others. Sean Patrick Flanery appears to be channelling an extremely bad impression of Christopher Walken, while Jeremy London only has a tiny one-dimensional part with which to work; Roark Critchlow comes out of it the best, but even then, he’s not as good as you would expect. The problem is not really with the actors though, it is the script. The dialogue is exceedingly poor and seems to be tailor made for ham-fisted performances, although there are a few moments where it does work, albeit not in any of the dramatic moments, and more in the light-hearted sections. There are some good moments by some of the supporting cast, as they fight valiantly to make something out of it, such as by Tyler Poelle, Jamie Strange, and Jennifer Jalene.
For a low budget production, some of the effects are quite good, but overall the effects and set decoration range from good to bad. When it comes to CGI, it brought to mind Babylon 5 era shots and spaceship design, although not as well executed. Some green screen work is also obvious and has problems, but that could just be down to time and money, not talent. Sci-fi is notoriously CGI heavy though and there are good things about a lot of the shots, some of which have been very well done; that it is not consistently so though, is probably the biggest flaw. The key sets however, have some serious problems. While the conceptual colour schemes for the two protagonist’s vessels are ok, the actual creation of them using lots of PC keyboards stuck to a wall is problematic. In contrast, when dealing with the alien vessels and the ships ‘engine matrix’, they’ve done a very good job. In fact the scenes where ‘Wake’ is exploring the alien vessel for the ‘Chaos Generator’ is probably one of the best scenes from a visual perspective and has some good atmospherics.
Overall, this is a film that wishes to be something more like Firefly, but is actually more at home with straight to DVD fodder. There is obviously some talent involved in this project, but the end result is unfortunately not as good as it could have been. The principal problem lies in the script though and some more time here would have been beneficial. Was it worth my time? While there were some good things about it, generally, not a hit.
