The Apocalypse

[Jack]

Just watched this last night.  Even though I'd seen it before, I had forgotten the pure gut-wrenching awfulness of it.  We start with Laura San Giacomo, she's completely nuts, and quoting Shakespeare.  Every line of of her dialogue is a Shakespeare quote.  Just do a quick Google on "Shakespeare quote" and yeah, that's her dialogue.  "To be, or not to be, that is the question" - you'll hear that close to 75 times before the movie is over.  She's on a spaceship, and the ship is loaded with solarium, a highly explosive and very valuable mineral of some sort.  She's supposed to meet with some people on another spaceship, but being nuts, she programs her ship to run right into the other one.  Now I'm no structural engineer, but it seems to me that even if your spaceship is five times the size of another, it might not be a good idea to have a head on collision.  Shows how little I know, the little ship is utterly destroyed and the larger one is completely undamaged.  After the smaller ship is obliterated, they then insert a quick shot of its captain screaming in terror.  Um, yeah, I think he'd already be dead at that point.  By the way, this is the last we'll see of Laura San Giacomo, even though she's apparently on this ship and the rest of the movie takes place aboard it.  Where did she go?  No idea.  We do gets lots and lots of videotaped segments of her played back on the computer system, quoting...yeah...Shakespeare.  But we never see her actual character again.  Oh, by the way, she programs the ship full of explosive cargo to fly into the Earth.

So, lets introduce Sandra Bernhardt.  Okay, Sandra isn't the hottest babe around, but at least she's got a nice personality, right?  Oh no.  No no no.  She's comes off as just about the most unlikable person you can imagine.  She owns a salvage ship and finds out about Laura's ship full of solarium.  Unfortunately she doesn't seem to have a crew for her ship (gosh, a nice person like her?), so she hires a gang of criminals who basically want to kill her and steal the cargo for themselves.  Now, never mind that the ship with the solarium is manned by Laura San Giacomo, which would seem to negate any salvage rights.  Just go with it.

Anyhow, Sandra and the group of thugs get to the big ship full of valuable cargo (it's a two minute trip).  The thugs immediately break out the weapons and go aboard.  Salvage?  Hmm...piracy maybe.  Okay, Sandra takes a real hands-off management approach, and spends the majority of the movie just sitting aboard her salvage ship and swearing at people over the radio.  As far as I could tell, Sandra only has one actual crew member, so if the thugs want to take over the operation, they would only have to kill that one person.  But, gunfights break out and everybody's shooting at everybody.  I have no idea why.  It goes on for a long time.

They've brought along a hacker to get into the computer system of the cargo ship, in an effort to take control of it.  About 25% of the movie is spent with this guy playing a game of "complete the Shakespeare quote" with little videotaped segments of Laura San Giacomo on the computer screen.  Did I mention you'll hear "To be or not to be, that is the question" about 75 times over the course of the movie?  The worst part though is the dialogue.  It's freakin' nonsense!  For isntance, at one point we're told that "the reactor blew".  This creates a little explosion that injures one guy.  I have no idea who he was anyway.  At another point a guy is crawling through some ventilation ducts.  He starts talking about how a magnetic field is being created, and gives lots of specific details about it.  Um, he has no test equipment whatsoever.  He holds a little necklace up to the side of the duct, and it's attracted to the metal.  C'mon, did they put magnets in the walls?  Anyhow, the whole magnetism thing has nothing to do with anything, and will never be mentioned again.  Just like everything else in the movie.  After about 10 minutes, I found it impossible to even pay attention to what these people were saying.  It's just pointless and more often than not, self-contradictory chatter.  We're repeatedly told that there's 20 million tons of cargo aboard this ship.  Just for giggles, I looked up the weight of an aircraft carrier:  97,000 tons.  So on this ship, which is about the size of a destroyer, they manage to carry cargo that weights as much as 206 aircraft carriers?  At one point Sandra quotes the velocity of the ship as "95 lightspeeds" or something.  Hmmmm...

Eventually the thugs pretty much kill all of themselves, except of course for the main baddie who sticks around for a big showdown.  Sandra and some other guy (I think he was the bartender from the beginning of the movie?  I really don't know) save the day.

Gotta love the special features on the disc as well.  There's "film info", which basically tells you the name of the film and what year it was made, as well as filmographies (plural), which is a short synopsis of Sandra Bernhard's career.  Oddly enough, it actually had a pretty good surround sound mix.  If only the actors, writer and director had one tenth the talent of the audio engineer...