Project : Genesis aka "Strange Horizons"
In the future, society is a dictatorial matriarchy; the "Motherhood" is the government. Split off from normal humanity are the "Aliens". Not really alien per-se, but called that because they have made themselves aliens from humanity. They take a drug called "Horizon" and never speak, and live seperately from the Motherhood.
In the midst of this is our hero, Pascal, who in the interest of free expression has done several things to tick of the Motherhood (leaving his wife, amongst other things). He's also managed to get on the bad side of Admiral Hardman, who has a plan for destroying the Motherhood. So the Admiral sets up Pascal to be attacked by an Alien warship in attempt to draw out the Aliens into conflict and find out their strategic capabilities. Pascal ends up crash landing on a nearby planet. The admiral thinks he's dead. Pascal spends a lot of time talking to himself, dreaming, and talking to his ship's computer, which also survived the crash. Later, an Alien escape pod lands near Pascal. He attempts to communicate with her but she's pretty ambivalent to hostile to his attempts. Eventually she approaches them and hey have sex. Later, Pascal finds out that the reason for tha twas only so the Alien would get pregnant, and meanwhile the Admiral's ship someplace explodes. Last we see are of Pascal, the Alien, and their four year old daughter still on the same planet.
OK, not much of a plot. I don't mean that in the sense that it was a bad plot, but simply that there wasn't much of one. The plot seemed to be mostly a setup to explore certain ideas. As far as sci-fi goes, this one literally has a production and speciel effects look in the class of Red Dwarf or Doctor Who or Dark Star. The limited locations and sets with a focus on dialog, and monologue, erminded me of watching a stage play.
This movie is an attempt to be about ideas. Exploring the implications of a dictoatorial matriarchal society and how that effects individualists, the aliens who don't speak and see strong signficance in even the slightes action. The intersection of two cultures based on the two lone survivors on the planet. There is a slight impression from the box notes that the intention was that the Motherhood and the Aliens destoryed each other and Pascal and the Alien Woman basically are re-starting humanity. The conflict between the admiral and Pascal about what the admiral is willing to do and sacrifice of others for the sake of bringing down the Motherhood, mixed in with his one meglomaniacal ambitions, and his hatred for Pascal once Pascal refuses to back his plans. Pascal's reflection on hiw wief and the Motherhood. It's a movie that attempts to be abou ideas.
Problem is, it doesn't execute well. The movie is pretty short at 79 minutes and a lot of time is spent with nothing going on, just people doing stuff to background music..stuff that doesn't add to the story or the ideas. With no production for sets or much to allow us to see the impact of what t he characters are talking about, dialog and it's executionis all important. There are a couple of problems with this. One, some of the delivery is not very good. the Admiral in particular gives a few important speeches with almost no feeling or facial expression. Two is that a *lot* of the dialog takes on a 'wanna-be-shakespeare' approach that sounds pretty stylized. The difference is that Shakespeare could say a lot with a few words whereas this dialog says not much with a lot of words. I also got the impression that the script, given the above framework, was trying to talk about too much but none of the subjects were given enough time or proper treatment.
So in the end, you know what the movie wanted to talk about, wanted to be about, but it never quite gets around to really actually talking about it, and then it's over. Like "Enemy Mine", there could have been a lot about Pascal and Alien Woman trying to learn about each other given the different cultures, and that she doesn't speak, etc...but it never really happens. Once she shows up, btw, the Admiral and the Motherhood sorta disaappear as story elements until the end.
I would guardedly recommend this one. It's not painful to watch, although a bit plodding, and others may get more out of the visual symbolism and dialog style then I did. It's a very low budget production that tries to raise some interesting ideas and some viewers may get more out of the exploration than I got
