Don't accuse me of expecting "Chinatown" here, because I already know the Sci-Fi Chanell has limited means. That said, limited means are no reasonable excuse for limited imagination or vision.
So, it's the future again and one of the not so friendly corporations that control Earth has sent a mission to Mars (there have been quite a few if those lately) to find an everlasting and inexpensive power source. Naturally they crash land in an almost half-exciting, almost well-executed scene which displays good planning ruined by the usual weak CGI. Soon the crew start to die and we find out that one of the crew is a government spy and that Mars is not a dead planet.
Every movie this network makes is either a format genre flick we've seen a million times before or a blatant rip-off of a popular film. At first, "Crimson Force" looks like it's going to be an "Alien" rip-off with shades of "Total Recall". But then the crew enter a "pyramid" (quotes because it has five sides) and get caught up in a power struggle between the ruling classes of Mars's surviving inhabitants. I think we were meant to be reminded of "Dune", but since the sets are so obviously small, the costumes so inexpensive, and the population so sparse, it reminds one more of a sadder incarnation of the 30s "Flash Gordon" serials. The way the second half plays out you'll likely wish they'd just finished ripping off "Alien" and been done with it.
To pad the running time (since the Martian plot is not all the complicated as it's written), our pretty-boy hero Ambrose is given flashbacks which explain why he's conflicted about working for the corporation, which in turn are a set-up to a typical made-for-TV character choice. The results aren't exactly deep. Most of the characters come with a whole two dimensions, including C. Thomas Howell's unlikeable Captain, the two "babes", the guys with accents, and the single non-white male.
The film was not necessarily a bad idea. But an idea is only the beginning and a lot can (and did) go wrong along the way. Apart from the terrible effects and the constraints of the budget, there's the direction. This was advertised as some kind of epic, so the director tries to emphasize how big everything is (the spaceship, the pyramid, the interiors...), which unfortunately just reveals how small the sets really are. If they'd tried some location shooting for once the viewer might not suffer claustrophobia from watching these "epics".
One star for an okay idea, a second for reminding me that I could do it better.
