Ultra Red

Stupid time-waster. Everything about it is wrong. Childish Special effects and worse acting. Decor is about to fall apart. Actually it was clearly an ultra bad idea to put this movie on. Just as it was a real bad idea to even produce it. Why bother to throw away any budget on a just terrible piece of thrash like this one is. If you want to throw away even more energy and time on a real dumb and stupid movie be my guest just don't come complaining I didn't warn you in advance please because I hereby do. I fell asleep a couple of times and the rest of the time I declared myself dumb and stupid to not press STOP and drop the thing in the trashcan.

OK, full disclosure, I baled before the movie was ten minutes in.

The CGI is cringeworthy. The rover rolls its wheels straight through boulders. The gaseous alien is pixellated. The characters are straight out of a (bad) school drama assignment. The set dressing is as thin as tissue. The dialogue is painful.

The plot is wafer thin. The rover is broken. Only one man can repair it. He's in jail. He's a genius with the mental capacity of a cardboard box. He can learn to be an astronaut in 12 hours, from a guy who you wouldn't trust to punch the code into a carwash.

Seriously, if the rest of the movie is as bad as what I saw, it has stolen the crown from Plan 9 From Outer Space.

I need a lie down.

Nothing to see here. A standard sci fi plot made by the talentless with zero budget.

The acting is awful, no wonder you have never heard of any of the actors before.

The dialogue is ridiculous and badly delivered.

The plot points are a joke. This was clearly written by someone with zero understanding of science, space or the sci-fi genre.

The ....errr...spaceship, is laughable. The sets are cheap. The lighting is nonexistent and the direction is weary.

On top of all this, it is boring. It trudges from one scene to another with no pace or vigour.

I have seen micro budget stuff like this before and it has been at least passable. This is not.

Absolutely dire.

The dialogue is cringeworthy, and made even worse by such poor delivery. Almost every word uttered sounds forced, contrived.

The plot is okay in general terms, but collapses once you get down to the detail. The main character continually overemphasises his sleaziness and rebel-without-a-cause temperament and ends up in a heavy-weapons fight with two crew-members all over a bottle of whiskey. In real life, such a misfit would never have been allowed anywhere near a NASA facility, let on board a mission to Mars.

Casting: Terrible - at least as far as the main characters are concerned. The minor players - such as the two pilots - should have been put in the major roles as they are clearly more competent and deserve better than this lousy movie. To be fair, though, most of the cast have been compromised by the awful script.

The directing isn't too bad, but as the old saying goes, "you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear."

One of the worst aspects of this film is the CGI. At times you'd think they'd used the stop-motion techniques employed in the "Jason and the Argonauts" movies of the 1960s.

Give this one a miss.

Indie filmmaker Michael Fredianelli takes off from his usual comfort zone of earth bound tough guy cinema to explore the final frontier with a sci-fi movie set mostly in space. This microbudget production is an impressive one and many of the visual effects utilized are jaw dropping especially when it comes to the indie arena. Of particular standout is the segment of the film depicting the Mars surface-- Sci-fi geeks will only recognize the familiar Agua Dulce terrain when they're done marveling at how skillful (if obviously exaggerated for effect) a recreation of the red planet the film achieves. It makes Mars seem truly frightening in all its desolate rocky and dusty landscape. Similarly, the movie makes the cold vacuum of space seem equally as vast and scary and borrows much from the look and feel from the Hollywood sci-fi classic Alien.

Well there is no denying the technical achievements on display with Ultra Red, its biggest problem is its script. It utilizes a plot that very much resembles Star Trek's The "Naked Time" and its Next Generation follow up "The Naked Now" and deals with an extraterrestrial substance that effects the brain similarly to alcohol. However the way the substance is discovered and delivered comes off clear as day as a rather clunky MacGuffin. Furthermore, there are other problems with believability. The crew of the spaceship (NASA no less) in the movie is comically unprofessional and it wasn't enough for the lead character to be a genius rover vehicle designer, but also a master thief with a rap sheet a mile long as well. Other times, the film's technobabble just comes off poorly developed like when we're told that a futuristic weapon operates on the same principle as said rover which itself is more clearly modeled after present day technology. Now, I'm no scientist, but elements like that read more as pure kayfabe to me and took me out of the movie a bit.

While it's highly ambitious and impressive in many facets as well as highly entertaining for much of its running time, Ultra Red stumbles in too many places to be a clear win and instead comes off as a rather mixed bag.