
The words Max Stone (Joe Mayes, Spent, A Christmas Cancellation) uses to describe the adventures of the Ghost Planet narrate a rather jovial revolution of bustling exploration “You just push the handle, drop into T Space, and take off to destinations unknown.” However, there is nothing jovial about exploring a galaxy where he and his half-brother George (Mark Hyde, Despiser, Days of Our Lives) and sister Julia (Claudia Troy, A Carolina Christmas, Joshua Tree) are trying to uncover technologies of an ancient race known as the Tesserans.
It can also be referred to as the race of aliens who went extinct without a trace but not before creating vessels, which remain technologically unmatched by humanity. This time, it seems like the siblings have located a motherlode of wedged ships a fully functional base. Until a neutron star combusts and they are forced to leave the location they’ve just discovered.
That was a year ago. Now George has some odd tumors over his body, his insurance will pay for their removal except for the 90% co-payment of course. And Max took a loan, pledging one of his organs, and that’s due now, about which he is not in a position to do anything. An action sequence where Max tries to make sure that his body does not surrender to one of the repo men causes the death of one turbo, and Max and George are taken into police custody while Trudy (Georgia Anastasia, TechNous, Eternal Room Service), the lady who shot Max, is missing. We see that the situation is very bad.
Writer-director Philip J. Cook (Beyond the Rising Moon, the Malice franchise) has made a melange of cultures, elements of the Cyberpunk world of Blade Runner the vastness of space as in Babylon the gloom of Repo The Genetic Opera the future has looked even darker. And, as with his fantasy Pungo A Witch’s Tale, he is quite audacious exposure to that fantasy due to the budget restraints. It has been an eventful journey for him from the Pungo era in the last four years. For Ghost Planet, yes, it does involve green screen integration with CGI, miniature models, and certain portions of the set built on a sound stage.
The end result is an upgraded version of what was seen in Sky Captain and the World of Tomorrow in 2004. It’s kind of strange at first but, because the whole movie was done like that, I did get used to it. They let the action of the film take place in the distant future earth, deep space, and even a backwater planet where the characters end up after Trudy’s boss John Moesby, who is played by Ulysses E. Campbell (Three the Stereotyped Way, Captain America The Winter Soldier) offers them and Trudy a chance to go back and complete the mission they had started.
The end result is a very engaging and, I mean this in the best way possible, engrossing narrative that has plot elements drawn from classical science fiction like lost alien civilizations, space marauders, and Vikings, their main girl Naiad, played by Julie Kashmanian (Wind and Bone, Hemisphere), adds an Alien flair to the film, and of course, there are bits of Mario Bava’s Planet of the Vampires Terrore Nello Spazio, one of the masters among the movies that inspired the alien.
Without a doubt, Ghost Planet does come with a few problems, most importantly the presence of some badly written dialogue that spoils a few scenes. The characters don’t wear any clothes or seem to have any looks that are meant for a half-futuristic world, they all look like they quite simply came from the present day. So maybe it’s clever, it spares the unintentional laughter that most fashion prophecies evoke when the said time allotment for the fashion doll has apparently passed. Seeing this is also strange when one is on the deck of a spaceship casually roaming around in a hoodie and jeans or a baseball cap tipped in a funny manner.
For the younger socialites that spend so lavishly on clothes and shoes such a sight would mostly be normal but if you come from an age where considering the genre of science fiction in movies meant throwing glasses at a publisher as they scrape the funds of their film than those flashy clips come off as rather charming as well, it is all a matter of point of view. This is quite appropriate because, in its concept, Ghost Planet is like the reloaded versions of the vitality era films like Planet of the Dinosaurs and Dark Star. For example, it is best for it’s audience to remember how the film was never meant to be filled with random sexual scenes with no relevance to the plot as there was a time one British gentleman, in a San Francisco pub, had this to say about ‘being American’.
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