Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar

When checking out the preview and the average score for this movie, I had serious doubts. A low-budget Sci-Fi film with a preview that doesn't entice usually end up as poor fare.

At times the lighting was iffy, the graphics decent but not blockbuster, and the internal ship sets seemed a bit cramped; but a solid story with pretty good acting cancel out the minor flaws. Also, the pacing should be noted as excellent. At no point did my attention waver.

Space Wars: Quest for the Deepstar delivers in its quest for entertainment. I recommend that all Sci-Fi fans give this movie a chance like I did.

I immediately noticed the very bad casting, all the actors lack charisma and personality and their acting is boring if not ridiculous.

The first half of the movie is just a sequence of actions with very few dialogs, so it's almost entertaining. Nothing spectacular or original. It feels like some washed out guardians of the galaxy, and we follow the heroes as they keep putting themselves in trouble. The CGI looks like a video game with some very bad green screens.

But that's where the film takes another turn for the worse, and the poor writing and acting take over the action scenes. It feels like they ran out of money and decided to focus on the character psychology. The film completely loses its pace and collapses into absolute mediocrity.

If you want some cheesy 60/70s sci-fi movies, watch Starcrash or Barbarella, they are better than this.

To me, Michael Paré brings back my childhood, the B movies that were at the same time awesome and ridiculous. It's easy to understand why the first thing that pops up when you google him is "how old is Michael Paré?". Well, he's 65 and he now plays in these independent movies that are as low budget as they come. But they are also fun.

In this one, stupidly called Space Wars because there are just a bunch of people on ships shooting at each other and nothing at the scale of a war, three parties are engaged in finding either a legendary space treasure or each other in order to enact revenge. The CGI is ludicrous, the green screen effects are obvious, the acting is almost terrible, the story is pathetic. Yet I enjoyed it. Not because of any inherent technical quality of the film, but because someone scrapped to get this done, did whatever they could to make it happen and had fun doing it.

Bottom line: a ridiculous movie, but one that fills me with nostalgia for the films of old, where the greatest achievement you could think of was getting the movie done and the rest was the pure joy of performing.

3 stars, and only that high because of the talent that was wasted

Wow, where to begin? The acting was actually good-ish. I appeared that many of the crew actually knew wat they were doing. And nice to see the spent their CGI money well.

But the script and the scenes ... oh my. I haven't seen women dressed like that in a space movie since cassette tapes were competing against 8-tracks. And the dialogue, wow. Did you get the script from a cracker jack box?

Yeah, some of the reviewers were right, this COULD be considered a 'fun' movie in some terms. But even fun movies have good scripts. I hope none of the actors plan on using this as highlights in their resume.

Really, the title of this review says it all. In the 1970's there were a number of cheap Italian knock-off sci-fi movies that were cheap, flashy and stupid. They also had STYLE.

This is pretty much a homage to those movies but with better effects and better actors. Yes, the script is stupid and the lines are awful but incredibly the actors do actually manage to give them some weight. Not a lot of weight, it must be said, but that they managed it at all is very much to their credit. The script manages to throw in some surprises, while (sigh) still including the many predictable scenes you come to expect from low budget movies

It's a very silly movie but it's also a remarkably enjoyable one that manages to decently punch above its low budget and a lot of credit goes to everyone involved in its making. By way of disclaimer - I was NOT involved in the production in any way, nor do I know anyone who was. Nobody goes out of their way to make a bad movie. They try to make a good movie, and with the limited resources available to them they came reasonably close to it.

So, get some popcorn, turn off your brain and enjoy it for what it is. A romp.

Oh, and I just noticed that someone else called their review "The 1970's called, they want their movie back" Ah well, I clearly wasn't the only fan of cheap Italian sci-fi knock-offs.