Ferocious Planet

I give it an 8 mainly for the good slips of humor that they give the audience here and there. Which is good, because if they tried to be totally serious, it would have felt corny.

My favorite: "Rule: Don't poke the alien." It was an interesting mix of characters thrown together by an experimental demonstration gone wrong (of course!) And a bunch of Washington Senatorial aides, scientists and a few marine guards are thrown into another dimension. Now how do they get back? What's nice about this flick is that the script doesn't really follow the tried and true tropes we come to expect from 'Scientist Experiments Gone Wrong' but sends the viewer towards different outcomes. . .with a bit of humor interspersed with the gore.

And the ending was. . .interestingly open to interpretation.

This is a good Saturday Night 'B' Flick. Not bad for SyFy.

Considering that it was a Scyfy movie, I have to say it wasn't as bad as most of the movies they produce.

The main problems are mostly budget related, but that's to be expected for a TV movie, and the actors didn't do as good of a job as they could have.

They were for the most part lacklustre performances, and Joe Flanigan was basically playing the same character he did in Stargate Atlantis, the only difference between Colonel Sam Synn, the character in this movie, and Lt. Colonel John Sheppard, the one from Stargate Atlantis, was that Sam Synn is a full bird colonel.

There was very little character information, you find out a few vague things about some of them, but not enough to understand their motivation.

Also, the ending felt like a cop-out. It seemed that they ran out of money or something and didn't have enough to film the final scene, or at least that was my impression. They had a million and one ways to end the movie that could have made it very interesting, and instead chose a very unsatisfactory way to do it.

On a positive note, the creature effects were more than satisfactory for a ScyFy movie, and they only looked bad in a few scenes.

All in all, this is not a movie I would watch again, not by a long shot, but if Ferocious Planet is any indication, then ScyFy is finally heading in the right direction.

A scientist endeavors to prove the existence of parallel dimensions by inventing a machine that provides a view through a portal to some of these alternate dimensions. During a demonstration of the device, something goes awry, and a bunch of people find themselves in the middle of what seems like an earthquake. But the reality of their situation is far worse. The machine has teleported them all to the dimension they were watching. From the title, you can guess the alternate universe is not where most people would want to spend their vacation.

One of SyFy's better efforts; the action is well handled, the creatures are designed and animated well, and the acting is above average. There's an ironic twist near the end, but too many clues make it pretty obvious long before the twist is revealed. The parking meter bits were actually clever, although the explanation for them was goofy.

The weakness is the formulaic approach: the characters are eliminated in the usual one-by-one manner of these type of movies, usually just as they say or do something stupid. It's usually obvious who's going to get it next, especially the clichéd knuckle-headed greedy guys in the group.

All in all, not bad for a TV movie and considering the weak theatrical releases out this summer, and the ticket prices that look like they were set by a big-oil executive, watching this for free is the better option.

"Ferocious Planet" wasn't all entirely bad, it had its moments, though few and far apart.

The story here is about some scientists having found a way to look into other dimensions, but then something goes wrong and a group of people are transported into another dimension, where they are fighting an unknown species of life. Sounds fairly alright, doesn't it? Yes. And the idea is actually good enough, but the movie suffered from a lack of ambition and the element to fully draw you in. And some of the decisions made by the characters in the movie makes you go "what? why would someone do that?" - it just doesn't always make sense.

As for the acting in "Ferocious Planet", well it wasn't too bad either. But frankly speaking, it was mostly mediocre performances. It was like they hadn't enough emotion and sparkling energy with them, and it resulted in that you felt distanced and didn't care about the characters in the movie. And you just got to love the role that John Rhys-Davies had in the movie, and the actual amount of time he was in the movie. But a good way to lure in people, by having a familiar name on the cast list.

For being a SyFy movie, then "Ferocious Planet" could have been worse than it turned out to actually be. The movie is adequate, and provides half-hearted entertainment throughout the entire length of the feature.

One this that really worked well for the movie, was the design of the creature in the other dimension. It looked really cool. It did look fake at times when it was moving, but most of the time it looked believable enough and good enough. So this worked well for the movie.

Having seen "Ferocious Planet" now, then I can say that SyFy have other movies available that are better than this one, and they also have a lot of movies available that are far worse.

It's always funny if you see big names on a sleeve of an unknown movie. Here the name that I want to mention is John Rhys-Davies. He was in the Lord of The Rings trilogy and the Indiana Jones fame. But he's maybe for 10 minutes in this SyFy production. And you know what SyFy mean, mostly really bad flicks but I guess that they have learned their lesson. This rather looks good. I even enjoyed it. Of course it's low on the red stuff, some killings do occur but not really to mention. But the movie started off really well with an experiment going awry and transports a group of observers into a nightmarish dimension. From their on they are on the other side. Some dinosaur looking creatures are making the way of survival a hard target. There is of course a lot of CGI, especially the creature but that's normal for SyFy. Nevertheless, it almost the same, creature, running, creature appears, running away. But it's one that you could see with your kids on a rainy afternoon. Somehow you keep watching what is going to happens next.