L5: First City in Space

Today, most if not all science fiction movies are in fact action movies with science fiction elements. Thus _Men in Black_ is an action movie with aliens, _I, Robot_ is an action movie with robots, and so on. There's really no reason a science fiction movie couldn't be a slapstick comedy in an undersea colony, a tear-jerker romantic tragedy on the moon, or an intellectual puzzler with robots. But no, so many SF movies are action thrillers that many people seem not to realize that they can be anything else.

This brings me to _L5: First City in Space_. This is the story of a city in space (the first, in case the title wasn't enough of a clue) which is running low on water. The story is mostly from the point of view of Keiko, an adorable little girl. The basic storyline has been well described by ian-woollard and mikecombs, who seem to have actually paid attention while watching the movie. I will add only that there are no laser battles, no homicidal maniac robots (or homicidal maniac anything else), and no martial arts. Again: THIS IS NOT AN ACTION MOVIE!

Don't get me wrong, I like sci-fi actioners. I really hope that Jackie Chan gets the chance to do his thing in zero-G before he dies or retires. But this isn't the movie for it. This is the movie for adorable little girls and brave scientists and engineers who undertake risky but not flashy missions for the sake of the city their family lives in. The science is (mostly) good, the story (mostly) plausible, and did I mention that Keiko is adorable?

OK, time for my gripe against this movie, aka the reason I didn't give it a 9 or 10. Here also is this comment's spoiler. After the water is secured, Daddy is alive, and Keiko has grown up to be mayor of L5, they have finally built another city. Yeah. One more. In thirty years. According to the NASA/Ames study the makers of this film used for reference, the time for one city to build another was three years, not thirty. Even if we assume that for some reason (politics, scarce water, whatever) it takes five years, this still means that five years after the First City in Space, there would be the Second City in Space, and over the next five years they would EACH build another, for a total of four. In five more years there would be eight, five years later sixteen, then thirty-two, then sixty-four. That's thirty years. So the final shot shouldn't have been two glorious cities side by side, but somewhere from sixty-four to ONE THOUSAND TWENTY-FOUR glorious cities (the 1024 number is thirty years of growth with a three-year doubling time).

Oh, and they should've been making satellite solar power stations.

If you are like me, you are a sucker for IMAX movies. The scale of the story, be it Elephants, Egypt or Space usually pays off at least a dozen times as huge objects fill my field of vision. I've seen a lot of IMAX movies, and this one is truly, truly the worst.

I knew there was trouble when the first sign of a space ship looked like an Estes model put against a mediocre galaxy scene. Think Battlestar Gallactica and divide by two.

The story is some garbage about some little girl and her life on the first city in space ( a phrase uttered so many times, I wonder if the repetition was intended as a dare ). A comet threatens something, and her daddy needs to fly to the meteor where a previously launched rocket misfired and fix it. This makes little to no sense, but why quibble- its a 35 minute movie in 3D, and we'll get over it when we see the money shots.

Allright, OK, this is where I let everyone know the dirty little secret of this movie. Her daddy guides his spaceship to the meteor, manuevers inside the rocket exhaust of an enabled rocket and starts the procedure to have the rockets thrust the meteor out of harms way. You might think that this scene would offer up every great or even cheesy special effect known to man. But how is the story conveyed? Aside from some brief (and pretty cool) 3D footage, the story is carried from the point of view of the little girl. We see the rocket's daring procedure from the L5 control room, in their simulation!! We see close ups of a by now not so cute little girl thinking!! And the most unbelievable thing of all- a shot in IMAX 3D on Kieko or whatever the hell her name is looking off pensively in a ball room !! Meanwhile, we get desriptions of her daddy's doings, then a brief narrated conclusion and it ends.

I would suggest anything rather than wasting money on this piece of garbage.

If you're looking for people evaporating in ("high technology") energy bursts, or gritty complex characters suffused with (yawn) adult tension and drama... or cataclysmic danger so obvious with a heroic quest so clearly laid out and evident that it (may as well, probably has) come to life from the pages of a comic book... with all due respect, please keep on looking, you're sure to find lots of what you're looking for. But as regards slapping this up against Blade Runner or Star Wars... please don't. Leave it be.

This is on an entirely different plane. It is low-key, the dialog is mostly narrated, the story deliberately paced, as slowly unfolding as a bedtime story. Hint! This IS a bedtime story, of a kind that technology has given us the ability to produce, but is seldom produced. The plot is surprisingly realistic -- in fact it more closely tows the line with what we sincerely desire in the thing called 'reality'. The concept of forward-seeing planners catching sight of and resisting a foreseen future disaster -- a shortage of water that might result in emigration back to Earth -- this is the 'real' stuff heroes are made of.

The perspective and the beauty shots of the colony are simply awesome, inside and out. This is a beautiful film for children with a story they can grasp and understand. And adults too... if they find themselves hyped with boredom fast forwarding thru the movie to jump onto IMDb and lob a 'sucks' review at it... just perhaps, it is time to switch to Decaf.

L5 (First City in Space) was announced to be a thrilling sci-fi movie, situated in the first man-made City in Space in the orbit of the moon. But there is some trouble with the water supply, so an audacious hero has to save the world in a difficult and risky mission.... A perfect action movie, and 3d-IMAX technology promised a remarkable experience?! BUT!! Imagine a small, 5 year old girl, showing her wild animals (chicken, fish, etc.) to the audience; set in an environment of cheap plastic instruments, bad textured computer simulations...

Ok; don't get me wrong: the movie really is not that boring, for there are the tensing tales of the girl's grandpa!!

And then the summit of it all: far out in space the hero is struggling for the sake of the City... sounds like action, right? But you never see anything about it - he just tells by radio: "It was a hard mission, but finally I made it!"

Movie over - money gone. Now you should awake your friends and leave the theatre!

The story is set in space, in a type of space habitat called a 'Stanford Torus'. This mini-world is endangered due to lack of resources; a dangerous mission is undertaken to try to recover water from a distant comet...

I liked the details about living in space, it's kind of like a short version of 'Silent Running', only more realistic.

The film is not very long, and the story is not exactly complex, but I thought it was technically well done, as did the people who saw it with me. It succeeds at a technical and an emotional level- you really empathize with the little girl who stars in it.

It's shown in 3D, on the wide-wide screen IMAX. The 3D and IMAX certainly worked, but it was a bit tiring- I think a longer movie would have been too much.

While it's certainly not Lord Of The Rings, it's worth a look.

All I can say, if the other reviewers thought that this was the worst film ever, they can't have seen many films. There are far, far worse films than this out there.