11/21/2023 0 Comments Gemini movie endingIn Los Angeles, Jill LaBeau is a friend and personal assistant to movie star Heather Anderson. The film had its world premiere at South by Southwest on March 12, 2017, and was released in the United States on March 30, 2018, by Neon. The plot follows the assistant of a Hollywood actress who must clear her name after her starlet boss is found murdered in her home. It stars Lola Kirke, Zoë Kravitz, Greta Lee, Nelson Franklin, Reeve Carney, Jessica Parker Kennedy, Ricki Lake, and John Cho. It is something that might have worked in a B-budget Alien copy from New World Pictures in the 1980s but with the big self-important polish the film gets, it feels like conceptual overreach.Gemini is a 2017 American mystery thriller film written, directed and edited by Aaron Katz. The film slots into being a closed timeloop where the script seriously abuses the concept of quantum entanglement to go out on an ending not dissimilar to Altered States (1980) – a reiteration of the whole love conquers time and space idea. It is like the twist ending of Planet of the Apes (1968) turned on its head. What kills the film though is the ridiculous shaggy dog twist about two thirds of the way through where it is revealed that the team have travelled to another planet but into Earth’s past. The film feels like it didn’t need the monster and mutating crewman but as though someone along the production end of things decided it needed to be there. Added to that is the mutating crewman, another standby of the Alien-influenced mini-genre. In particular, the scenes where the sphere seems to have given birth to some sort of creature that stalks the crew through the hallways of the ship but remains in the shadows and is almost never seen fall very much into the Alien mold. It is not long before the film is tripping over its Alien (1979) references – the scenes with the crew on a journey through an inhospitable terrain to deliver the sphere to a cave resembles the journey into the abandoned Engineer’s ship. Konstantin Samoukov and the alien from the sphere While a worthy job has been done in at least matching mouth movements etc, the delivery of the dialogue is flat and makes the characters seem awkward. Moreover, the only viewing version of the film I could find was one where the Russian original had been dubbed into English for Netflix and the characters given English names. The arrival at the unknown planet plot seems filled with interesting possibilities but the characters are an anonymous bunch. All of this seems promising but Project Gemini manages to miss the boat in large ways. The film has some standout effects of the ship leaving orbit, going through the wormhole, arriving at the new world etc. Variations on such a premise have worked well for everything from 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968) to tv shows like Lost in Space (1965-8), Space: 1999 (1975-7) and Star Trek: Voyager (1995-2001). Project Gemini starts off with a big conceptual reach – the first ever journey via warp drive (although what we have looks more like it is through a wormhole) a group of astronauts on their way to seed an alien planet and create a new Earth – only for them to emerge somewhere where they have no idea where they are. Project Gemini was a directorial debut for Seri Beiseu (that’s the name on the credits, although the IMDB insists on calling him Serik Beyseu). (See Russian Cinema for a more detailed listing). The last few years have produced some excellent works that often sit in the intersectional area between science-fiction and horror with the likes of The Blackout (2019), Sputnik (2020) and The Superdeep (2010). Russian fantastic cinema of the late 2010s/2020s is producing some of the most exciting genre content in the world at the moment. However, the journey through the warp has also unleashed a creature from inside the sphere that seems intent on hunting them. They land on the planet and find the conditions suitable to open the sphere there. They emerge at a different destination where the crew have no idea where they are. The ship is launched but something happens immediately after they enter the warp. Their intent is to open the sphere on a planet there and create the conditions for Earth Two. Steve Ross now heads Project Gemini, a ship to be sent to another star system using the warp drive. It is believed that this has been left four billion years ago by aliens who were intending to terraform Earth. Hope is found with the discovery of a cave containing a warp drive and a sphere. Earth is dying due to a virus that is destroying plantlife.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |
AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |