Proyecto Gémini

The directing was bad - especially directing the cast, who were cringeworthily bad to begin with. That one guy faking a deep voice to sound tough was a joke. But the writing was even worse. There was so much ridiculous and phony dialogue in between a whole bunch of filler with very little substance, that the 98 min runtime felt neverending, especially in the first half. The last half had a little suspense and thrills, and some nice twists and a partially cohesive story coming together, albeit generic and cliched. But what was impressive and the reason for my high score of 5, was the excellent cinematography and stunning visual effects. This film may have been more appreciated as a short, with all the filler and nonsense dialogue edited/cut out. Nevertheless, it's a 5/10 from me.

Sure, I will admit that I was immediately suckered into watching the 2022 sci-fi thriller "Proekt 'Gemini'" (aka "Project 'Gemini'") as I saw the rather interesting-looking cover for the movie. The whole outer space concept with the somewhat Lovecraftian theme and tentacled creature was a sure win for me.

Had I heard about "Proekt 'Gemini'" from writers Natalya Lebedeva and Dmitriy Zhigalov prior to sitting down to watch it? No. Not even a single thing. So all I knew about the movie was the cover and the synopsis presenting the movie.

I will say that director Serik Beyseu managed to deliver an entertaining enough movie here with "Proekt 'Gemini'", though it was somewhat of a copy-paste of the classic Ridley Scott movie "Alien" in many ways. And yeah, that actually works, but on that account this 2022 sci-fi thriller just sort of came off as being a mere knock-off and not really delivering much of anything new and innovative.

It should be said that the movie certainly is watchable, don't get me wrong. However, it just is a movie that borrows heavily from other already well-established movies in the sci-fi genre. So don't go expecting too much here.

Visually then "Proekt 'Gemini'" was actually good. Lots of nice special effects with proper CGI that came off as being realistic and also being eye-candy to look at. So in that aspect, then this sci-fi thriller benefitted well from having a proper special effects team working on it.

I wasn't familiar with the cast ensemble in the movie, but I was somewhat baffled as to why the Russian cast were speaking English. I assume that I had the misfortune of watching a dubbed version, which is something I tend to avoid if possible. A movie should be enjoyed in its original language, no doubt about it.

"Proekt 'Gemini'" wasn't as impressive as I had hoped. And while it certainly is watchable and enjoyable enough for what it was, it just failed to be an outstanding movie. So I believe that come next week, then I will have forgotten about this movie, and nor do I think I will ever return to watch it a second time.

My rating of "Proekt 'Gemini'" lands on a mediocre five out of ten stars.

This is the worst movie I have ever seen. And no, not so bad that it is already good and worth seeing how bad it is. Don't. Just don't.

I don't know who created this, but my guess is someone with money saw "Alien" and thought: "I also make good space movie..haha!"

I mean...where do you find a whole cast of actors who have never seen human emotions before? _Any_ emotion.

There are no words to describe the dialogue adequately. Imagine a verbal vomit of cliché after cliché after cliché.

At first we laughed at how unbelievably awful it was but that wore off and we were barely able to survive the whole experience.

As for the rest of the movie... no script, card reading acting, stiff. The plot is the usual - earth is dying from pollution and disease, a compatible planet is found, and off go our protagonists with an alien artifact found deep in the earth to terraform the new planet. Not a bad plot, but OMG, the acting: none; the script: none. So wooden. It's hard to believe they couldn't find real actors, or maybe just didn't want to pay them. It's painful to watch. I kept my fingers on the FF button through the whole movie. I've seen some great Russian SciFi movies, in fact they're very good at it, but this is just painful. There's a monster, of course, ripped straight off Alien, but only a couple glimpses of it. Not kidding, you really don't want to waste the time.

This movie was so not it. The acting was really bad. There was almost no point in this movie. The only part that I found a little better was the special effects. And they still weren't that great.