It's not often that we see a sci-fi film that doesn't have a big budget and not produced by a major studio.
Films within this genre naturally require a lot of money for the CGI and general production design.
However, there is occasionally the odd independent release that has decided to go this route.
This particular new release has got a strange concept that I'm not sure where it was going to go in terms of tone.
Now that I have seen it, it was like I was watching an arthouse version of Red Dwarf with an almost Big Brother environment whilst giving nods to 2001: A Space Odyssey.
The purposeful low budget sets and costumes gave us an effective grounded look to the story. This gave us time to concentrate on the characters and it's themes of achieving your ultimate dream both for you personally and as a species.
Steve Laplante was a very capable lead and I liked the journey his character went. He had a very likable screen presence and I think it was helped by his supports.
Larissa Corriveau in particular produced a lot of the films energy and Hamza Haq gave us some good comedic moments as did Denis Houle
I was surprised at how entertained I was. There's genuine laughs to be had amongst the surrealness of the situation.
You can see that the people behind making it loved the material and are fans of sci-fi.
If I was being picky, I think some of themes could have been better utilised. This would resulted in a more satisfying ending as there were some loose ends not quite tied up.
But even with those issues from a personal perspective, this is still a very entertaining watch. The concept worked, the characters are easy to invest with, the deadpan humour is great, the minimal production design enhances the grounded story well and there's a quirky charm to it that is very infectious.
