Damsel (2018)

In the middle of the Utah desert, two men sat at a peculiarly situated stagecoach stop.  The younger man (David Zellner) said he was heading West to make a new start.  The older man, a preacher (Robert Forester), scoffed at that idea.  The West would be just as bad as where he had come from, though perhaps bad in a new way.  He had enough of the West and was returning to the East.  The old man grew impatient for the stagecoach.    Eventually, he stripped off most of his clothes, handed his tattered bible to the other man, and marched into the desert in his long johns.

At a barn dance, Samuel Alabaster (Robert Pattinson) and Penelope (Mia Wasikowska) were partners with wide grins.  The music was energetic and the dancers stamped the ground like an Irish river dance.

On a lonely northwestern shore, a man rowed a boat a shore.  He unloaded a crate that contained a miniature horse!  The man was Samuel and the horse was Butterscotch.  He made his way to a town and sought Parson Henry.  He found the drunken Parson Henry on the beach.  Notably, Parson Henry proved to be the younger man from the stagecoach stop and he wore the preacher's clothes and carried his tattered bible.  Samuel hired him via telegram for unspecified purposes.  After making Parson Henry presentable, the pair rode into the wilderness.  Samuel eventually explained that Penelope was kidnapped and he was on a rescue mission.  As soon as she was safe, he wanted Parson Henry to marry them.

Billed as a dark comedy, there is precious little comedy to be had.  Here is a collection of motley characters who, once you get to know them, are mostly dislikeable or bad.  Parson Henry, who links the tale together, is a coward who has no direction.  He wants to latch onto something or someone.  So, he's a parasite?  Samuel is an unreliable source, painting a picture that isn't accurate.  Props to Pattinson for taking such a role and doing a great job in it, but Samuel gets less and less likeable as time goes on.  Penelope is a sympathetic character but fails to be likeable; she's a very masculine character, destroying all the men she encounters.

What was the point of this story?  Parson Henry is unchanged from when met at the stagecoach stop.  The other characters have been dislodged from the lives they had, but the future is unknown.  It's like a story about a house that burned down that ends with the family staring at the ashes before walking away.  Uh, okay.  Throughout the movie, there are bits that ruin the setting.  That stagecoach stop in the middle of the desert was one such instance.  There is litterally nothing else in sight and it isn't a crossroad.  How would the potential rider get to the stop?  When leaving the town, Samuel had a chicken in a birdcage on top of Butterscotch.  What's that about?  On their first night out, they eat the chicken and the birdcage is not seen again.  Oh, okay.

Hard pass on this one.  Zellner made a much better movie: Kumiko the Treasure Hunter.  Watch that instead.

Supernova (2000)

The Nightingale is a medical rescue ship currently cruising through space.  A new co-pilot has been assigned to the ship, the over serious and humorless Nick Vanzant (James Spader).  As it happens, he is a perfect fit on this humorless and over serious crew though each of them treat him as an unwanted interloper, most especially medical officer Kaela Evers (Angela Bassett).  Once all the crew have been given a brief biography, a distress call arrives.  Strangely, the call is direct; most calls are assigned via a 911 call center which is never detailed beyond that throwaway line.  The call is long distance and will require a dimension jump, which turns out to be a risky maneuver.  No sooner has the ship completed the jump than it is struck by debris and tumbling into a rogue moon orbiting a high-gravity blue giant and suffering additional emergencies related to the dimension jump itself.

The movie alternates between a dull noir vibe and a frenetic panic. No one on this ship is friends with anyone else. Yerzy (Lou Diamond Phillips) and Danika (Robin Tunney) are lovers but she cheats on him with just a little prompting. Captain Marley (Robert Forster) knowingly puts the crew at risk during the dimension jump, placing the ship in mortal danger but for the extraordinary piloting skills of Vanzant. The one and only person who needs saving is a specimen of health and really only needed extraction, not medical help. Larson (Peter Facinelli) comes across as an untrustworthy bad guy from the first moment. He's got the charm of a used car salesman and the sincerity of a politician in a safe district. He offers an unbelievable tale of being abandoned by fellow scavengers and has also lied about the contents of his shuttle. Sounds like someone who should be given run of the ship, including the computer core and the bridge. Meanwhile the only person who distrusts Larson goes to the moonbase to putatively get fuel for the Nightingale but also to investigate Larson's story.

James Spader was not the right person for this.  He plays the arrogant prick just fine but action hero he is not.  I could buy his piloting prowess but when he got into fisticuffs with the obviously superior villain, it was too much suspension of disbelief.  Despite plenty of screen time, he's still a mostly unlikeable fellow.  If he dies, so what?  That is not how the audience should view the main character.

Angela Bassett is just as serious and humorless as Spader.  I think she cracked a smile once.  Other than that, she was a mostly sour character who was largely unaware of what was happening on the ship.  Her ties to Larson were weakly portrayed and could have been dumped if it weren't the hook for the rescue in the first place.

Robert Forester was wasted.  His part is small and added nothing.  When I saw this movie the first time, I thought he was an odd casting choice.  Watching it this time, I of course realized he had been in The Black Hole.  It may have been a hint of things to come that he was working on a PhD thesis regarding how violent cartoons like Tom & Jerry had been banned in the early 21st century.  Ah, humanity has lost its sense of humor.  That explains why this crew is a dour bunch.

None of the crew were likeable enough that I felt anything when they were killed off.  The ship's computer - "Sweetie" - has simultaneous conversations with multiple crewmen in multiple parts of the ship in the early scenes but, when the bad guy is roaming the halls with murder on his mind, she's useless.  Crewmen get spaced and somehow she doesn't alert any other crew.

With only minutes remaining before the ship's orbit deteriorates and second before the blue giant goes Supernova, the crew has to fight to the death and get to the only remaining dimension jump pod!  Behold the excitement!  Yawn.

A weak blend of Alien and Dead Calm.  Director Walter Hill had such confidence that he was credited as Thomas Lee.  The dimension jumping special effects are cool though.

Skip this one.

The Black Hole (1979)

The USS Palomino is returning from a long exploratory mission when they pass near a black hole.  To their surprise, the long lost USS Cygnus is located nearby.  Dr. Kate McCrae (Yvette Mimieux) is particularly interested since her father served on the ship when it went missing.  They fly in to take a closer look, fighting the increasing gravity of The Black Hole all the way, but suddenly enter a zero gravity field around the Cygnus.  There appear to be no signs of life.  No sooner have they made a pass of the ship than the gravity takes hold again.  The Palomino suffers damage fighting back to the null gravity field of the Cygnus and must make repairs before they can continue.  They land on the Cygnus, which suddenly shows signs of life.

Boarding the ship, they are disarmed by unseen forces and then 'led' by opening doors to the ship's bridge. There they meet Dr. Hans Reinhardt (Maximilian Schell) and his robot enforcer, Maximilian. Reinhardt spins a tale about a damage ship unable to return. The crew left - never making it back - while he stayed to repair the Cygnus and continue his research. In the intervening years, he has constructed faceless androids to crew the ship. Captain Holland (Robert Forester), Reporter Harry Booth (Ernest Borgnine), and Vincent the Robot (Roddy McDowell) all encounter things on the Cygnus that contradict Reinhardt's telling.

There are some oddball facets to the movie.  Vincent has a fully developed personality and is entirely unlike a robot.  He provides snarky banter and certainly doesn't follow Asimov's laws of robotics.  Bob (Slim Pickens) even has a western twang.  Meanwhile, all other robots are mute, including Maximilian.  Oddly, Maximilian seems able to speak with Reinhardt.  Perhaps they shared ESP, like Kate did with Vincent.  It was strange that she could only use her ESP with the robot and not her fellow humans.  Does Vincent have a special ESP circuit installed? 

There are a lot of crazy problems with the movie. The Cygnus has been here for 20 years and, on the very day it plans to fly through the black hole, it is smashed to bits by a meteor storm. What, they didn't see them coming? They were glowing red! Why did Reinhardt turn against the crew of the Palomino? If he had just let them go, all would have worked out fine, except for that meteor storm he didn't see coming. After seeing what happened to the fully-crewed Palomino last time it was beyond the null gravity field of the Cygnus, what made Harry Booth think he could pilot it solo? The ending is truly bizarre, with Reinhardt melding with Maximilian and ending on a fiery landscape, presumably hell. Hardly a sci-fi ending. Meanwhile, the survivors of the Palomino find themselves traveling through the black hole, flung to some distant and unexplored region. Happy ending? Hardly! That scout ship isn't going to support them for long and the odds of finding a habitable planet are extremely slim.

When I originally saw this - as a 12 year-old - I thought it was mostly cool.  I loved Vincent and Bob most of all and made them out of Legos.  Today, it's a movie that had potential but was poorly executed.  The effort at some 2001: A Space Odyssey ending was misguided.  Vincent and Bob are now my two least favorite characters.