Science Fiction Volume One the Osiris Child Review

ByElias Savada.

If you create a film and title it to propose information technology's the beginning of a serial, you better promise that your audition will get in in quantity and that your product volition offer upward quality. Tossing in some originality would help, too, rather than using the beg-infringe-and-steal approach for this depression-budget effort from Australian director Shane Abbess (Gabriel, Infini). The Osiris Child: Science Fiction Volume One is an adequate retread of tropes found in Avatar and the Alien franchise, offering a futuristic look at an Earthlike planet far, far away being plundered for commercial gain. $.25 and pieces (starfighters and a low key cantina) from Star Wars here, a creature that looks plucked from The Fifth Chemical element and grafted on to some wild things from Maurice Sendak over at that place. The dusty/dirty production design is vaguely reminiscent of any Mad Max film. Mix thoroughly and sprinkle in shopworn clichés, standard-issue stereotypes, and some off-putting narration, and it deflates what could accept been a nice sci-fi soufflé. On the plus side, there are some fine visual effects, decent acting, and a (too limited) presence of Rachel Griffiths, equally the rock-common cold face of Exor, the latest in a string of evil corporations that take (dis)graced cinema'due south realm.

The script by Abbess (from a story he concocted with Brian Cachia) is unsettlingly disjointed, cleaved down into seven uneven chapters that set up various characters along parallel timelines. Rather than intercut the stories and build momentum, the film often rewinds the clock when a new episode title ("The State of Indiana," "Manifest Destiny," "The Long Road," etc.) flashes beyond the screen. Only because you have a express upkeep doesn't mean you take to frame a motion picture in such an incoherent mode.

These feeble restarts, from the perspective of either of the two adult male protagonists, allow for filling in the backstories of Lt. Kane Sommervile (Daniel MacPherson), a disgraced state of war hero turned infrastructure officer and so turned renegade warrior, who teams up with Sy Lombrok (Kellan Lutz), an escapee from 1 of the corporation'south soul-robbing, grime-filled prisons. These jails and numerous Exor-operated mines use cheap labor to provide Earth-bound minerals, enriching General Elana Lynex (Griffiths), an water ice queen who rules from a clean perch in a spaceship hovering above the planet. Historians might compare this captive labor performance to the 162,000 criminals that were sent to Australia by the British in the 18th and 19th centuries to settle the continent.

At that place's a nice, spunky performance past Teagan Croft as Indi, the xi-year-old daughter of Kane, a dad hunk with a bad shoulder and a busted wedlock (mom's back home, on Earth). The initial meet and greet that opens the film plays like a bring-your-girl-to-work outing, each taking target practise at road signs. Later, when the planet's entire population is brought into jeopardy past corporate malfeasance, the daughter becomes the common crusade for both men, an unlikely alliance on a rescue mission.

Every bit with any nasty, greedy corporation, a undercover agenda goes madly amiss and the cover up is at the expense of the planet's have nots. The haves also are targeted. As if the lives of the angry prisoners weren't beaten downwards enough at the iron easily of sadistic Warden Mourdain (Temeura Morrison), the caged inhabitants at the Ovir Ultramax Prison are likewise guinea pigs in an ugly genetic experiment. Pushed to their limits, a riot and escape plan is hatched by the convicts. Full general Lynex uses imitation facts to hide the out-of-control situation from her superiors, then starts a countdown clock for Protocol 84, a worldwide doomsday scenario that pushes the rag tag rescue squad of Sy, Kane, and a pair of outlaw footstep-siblings to do noble and reckless things. A virus is afoot; genocide awaits.

Bug with the film's continuity issues expose its flaws. The lumbering monsters that waltz about the planet'due south countryside infect the humans with a gene-altering fluid that transforms them, all likewise quickly, into more lumbering monsters. Information technology's hard to believe these creatures are every bit quick and cunning as portrayed.

The Osiris Child plays as a derivative space western, with escalating excursions into gunfights that are simply video game shoot-em-ups. Despite feeling this moving picture should piece of work, it doesn't. It's a serviceable diversion (which explains a DIRECTV premiere and limited theatrical run day-and-dating with its availability on video on demand), simply not a franchise architect.

Elias Savada is a movie copyright researcher, critic, craft beer geek, and gorging genealogist based in Bethesda, Maryland. He helps program theSpooky Motion picture International Film Moving-picture show Festival, and previously reviewed forFilm Threat andNitrate Online. He served every bit an executive producer on the 2015 horror filmHigh german Angst, Penny Lane's accolade-winning documentaryNuts!, and the forthcoming supernatural thrillerAyla. He co-authored, with David J. Skal,Night Carnival: the Secret World of Tod Browning(the revised edition volition exist published in 2017 by Centipede Printing).

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Source: https://filmint.nu/science-fiction-volume/

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