I just watched this movie on the Sci-fi network. Let's make one thing perfectly clear: there has never, ever been a quality film or television show that has used the phrase `It's on a need-to-know basis'. Once you hear that phrase, and its subsequent follow-up phrase `believe me, I need to know', you can rest assured you're watching something written by someone with absolutely no creativity.Sandra Bernhard is terribly miscast in this five hundredth derivation of `Alien'. Whining and sneering her way through this movie, she sounds ridiculously unconvincing spouting the technical mumbo-jumbo necessary for science fiction films. She aint no Sigourney Weaver, that's for sure. How someone so marvelous in something like `Roseanne' can be such a bad actor in films like this and `Hudson Hawk' is one of the mysteries of life.This film has the production values of a high-school play: cheap-looking sets, bad lighting, and clumsy-looking props. The spacesuits look like second-rate rejects from Joe's Army Surplus. When Sandra comes back into the ship after a spacewalk, she flips the visor lid up, and there's no seal around it! The flimsy visor looks like it was made from a clear plastic pie-cover from Safeway. There are no special effects, unless you call an exterior shot of the spaceship a special effect. They couldn't even spring for some fancy flashing lights or decent music; tapping military-style drumbeats punctuate some of the scenes, while someone practicing a bass fiddle provides the rest of the music.Typical of bad films, during the shootout scenes, many many shots are fired in all directions, but it is only coincidental that anyone gets hit, even at point-blank range. Is it wise to fire a gun onboard a spaceship while you're surrounded by all kinds of machinery that is keeping you alive? Most of the film consists of close-ups of people standing around talking or arguing while sepia-colored walls float in the background. I'm convinced that the dialogue was written by a thirteen-year-old boy after watching video games for eighteen hours straight: `she belongs to me', `it's stuck in a loop!', `you don't drink martinis!', and so forth. You get the idea.As if that isn't bad enough, a videotaped Laura San Giacomo rocks back and forth spouting Shakespeare. Good thing she had `Just Shoot Me' to fall back on.The only way to describe the quality of this film is that this is the kind of movie they show on Saturday afternoons when the football game is pre-empted. The television station figures `what the hell, there's no one watching anyway.' It's either that, or an infomercial.

This movie is not as bad as it may seem at first. The screenplay is ludicrous sometimes, but the actors save the day: Sandra Bernhard plays the captain of a spaceship who hates the rest of the world and spends her time off in bars, kicking some teeth in. Tougher than Ripley ("Alien"), less scrupulous than Han Solo ("Star Wars"). Frank Zagarino is an intense villain who gets plenty of opportunity to hurt and kill people. And Laura San Giacomo I remember from "Quigley" is amazing as the crazy programmer using Shakespeare quotes for passwords.Talking about quotes, here's my favorite line from the movie (re-translated from German dubbed version, so maybe not exactly the same words): "There's no danger our ship could be hit by a meteor. It is too big." Say you love logical thinking.Anyway, I found this quite entertaining despite several flaws in the story (voted 5/10). The worst one: we are not told what became of the programmer, she just disappears from the spaceship. One little correction: the cargo on board threatening to destroy the Earth is not nuclear warheads as mentioned in the plot outline, it's an element named "Solarium" that will blow up when staying too long in a magnetic field.

This film could have been interesting, but it wasn't. The thing that seemed most odd about this film was that a few times during the movie, the group started fighting with the guy who was trying to figure out the puzzles and save the ship. I suppose they figured that if he was beat senseless he could solve the problems more efficiently. Anyway, I try to find some reason to see a movie in most of my reviews, so you might consider this movie if you're interested in weird uses of Shakespeare.

If these movies - there seems to be about one per year - could possibly hew any closer to copying "Alien", they would. It is merely the aim of these films to make Alien all over again. The music. The characters and their conflicts. Even fragments of dialogue! "I don't trust so and so ...", "All I want is what's comin' to me..." These things either take place in space or underwater. Virus(1999), set on an ocean ship, was an interesting variation. The prime point of entertainment for me is the fatuousness of the imitation.