Deep Space (2016) (film review)
The opening introduction to the 2016 film ‘Deep Space’, previously called ‘Teleois’, reveals the history of GC humans, genetically superior humans who are sent into space for exploration created by the Glenn Corporation. The most obvious difference with this crew is their blink rate is down and, well, they act as if they are superior, despite no lesser humans are around even before they reach their destination.
The crew of the spaceship Teleios are sent to salvage a deep space mining vehicle orbiting the moon Titan and find two survivors, a crew member, Travis O’Neil (actor Weetus Cren) and an AI humanoid Lulu (actress Ursula Mills). The message from Earth is to bring the cargo back to Earth with every other consideration secondary, except the cargo is missing and they have to find it.
So much is spoiler but you will find yourself watching until the end.
The Teleios crew tend to come over as smug superiors and rarely individual and hard to tell apart as they mostly act the same way until they start to get infected. Even when one of their number is severely hurt, they are mostly unemotional, although something spoiler is slowly turning them emotional. They are trying to work out what happened and slowly deteriorate. None of them are particularly nice people let alone root for. I’ve seen this in a couple films and it tends to come over as neutral because they don’t even do enough to do seriously hate them and these people aren’t beyond torturing someone for information who is probably not much better than themselves.
For a low budget film a lot of its expense seems to be devoted to the CGI effects, although the long credits seem to hide that. In many respects, having a limited number of sets, this is a bottle film. I do think it could have done a lot more. Plotwise, it could have been put in a thriller genre so is more border-line SF than it should be.
An odd comment from doing research, there are a lot of films called ‘Deep Space’ out there and some aren’t available so be careful that you’re picking up the right one, more so as I was trying to find the Fred Olin Ray film that came out earlier.
GF Willmetts
August 2024
(pub: 101 Films. 1 dvd 86 minute film. Price: varies. ASIN: 101FLMS250)
cast: Sunny Mabrey, Lance Broadway, TJ Hoban and many more, mostly unknowns
