Reviews

Anybody who sees this film expecting the second coming of Citizen Kane is fooling themselves. Folks, it's just a movie meant to entertain us. And in that sense, I think it did a fine job. Sure there were holes in the plot and some mediocre CG effects, but overall it didn't do too badly in my book. My main gripes were in the opening scene. So if I'm flying a giant cargo plane and it starts making funny noises, I'm certainly not going to open up the crates. And that CG snake is pretty badly done. Why a snake? A monkey would have been more convincing, and most importantly, monkeys make us laugh! I was impressed with the set design though. Very effective use of set design to give us the sense of claustrophobia. The main control room was quite a contrast to the rest of the cold blocky hallways. Overall, not a bad job, especially from the typical giant snake movie. Faced between Anaconda or Boa at the video stores, I'd take Boa in a heartbeat.

Being a huge science fiction fan I picked this movie to balance out my wife's romantic comedy pick. Ironically, in spite of all the expectations of a terrible B grade movie, I was pleasantly surprised in some areas. OK, so there was a laughable storyline. Was this a blatant ripoff of that terrible 70's movie FIREFOX with Clint Eastwood? And if so, why would anybody choose to ripoff such a disaster to begin with? Dale Midkiff couldn't act his way out of a paperbag, much less this movie. The CGI special effects were embarrassingly bad and were barely a step above 1950's Buck Roger's flying saucers. BUT here's the good stuff. Judd Nelson is actually pretty good in this film. Maybe I'm so used to seeing him in his typical schoolboy role, but he really does a reasonable convincing job as the conspirator. And any opportunity to watch William Shatner is always good. The set design was surprisingly good for a movie that probably didn't have much for sets. A very interesting design for the flight deck, especially from an aircraft buff like myself. And a nice design for the aircraft itself, reminiscent of the old Valkyrie experimental airplanes that were mothballed by the airforce after a few disastrous test flights.

I saw this film on the Sci Fi Channel and thought the storyline was horribly corny and the acting was tragic at best. By the way, did anybody catch some of the names in the end credits? Obviously the film makers didn't take themselves too seriously. But being a car guy, I was intrigued with the cool designs of the cars so in my typical nosey fashion, I had to research some of the sponsors and logos listed. So I stumbled across an auto racing forum that the designer of this film (David) and his friends had posted some comments about: http://forums.realride.com/showthread.php?s=&threadid=145 An interesting insight to the behind the scenes difficulties they had making this film, budget and time being the obvious factors. However, it seems the main car was built full scale car and all the other cars are partial sections with the obvious CGI embellishment. He also seems to be quite knowledgeable about racing which is perhaps why he was hired for the job. Looks like he also enlisted some help from Craig Breedlove's design team too. Before reading these comments, I would have given this film a 4 but having had a little more insight now, I give the film makers credit for trying to achieve much more with little resources.