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For Starter, this is certainly The Asylum’s mockbuster version of Dune, and that phrase alone sets the bar immensely low. But, goddammit if I didn’t have more fun watching this than Denis Villeneuve’s ponderous epic. For a start, this is about seventy minutes shorter, has considerably better pacing, and certainly more sandworms. Sure, the sandworms here are sometimes poorly-animated the sandworm riding scene yeah, they probably should not have bothered. But it has energy, And the characters appear to care considerably more than Paul Atreides, who suggested that simply getting out of bed felt like a titanic chore.
The heroine here is Astrid (Killian), a pilot in the Space Force who gets cashiered for disobeying orders and rescuing a Russian astronaut. As a punishment, she’s given a command aboard a less than stellar ship with an even worse crew and set on a perform an equally dreadful mission on a desolate planet to retrieve a craft that had gone out of contact. Unfortunately, the place has been infested by sandworms, which makes Astrid’s task much more difficult, as these iron-feeding monsters can smell blood and are always hungry. Luckily, and this is just the first of many things in common with Tremors, they cannot reach you on rocky surfaces. You will certainly not be blamed, when Astrid starts building makeshift bombs, for thinking that “A few household chemicals in the right amounts”
If this is Dune, it has had all the political and religious overtones removed and brought down to a pure slice of action SF. I can’t say I mind too much because what’s gone was definitely my least liked part of the larger movie.
Equally remarkable is the unremarkable way in which nobody raises an issue regarding the fact that, including Astrid, three quarters of her new crew are now women: even her commanding officer. Young, who looked a little puffier than when she starred at David Lynch’s Dune (mind you, that was 37 years ago, and I’m a bit puffier myself than I was in 1984). This is how gender equality should be practiced, and it should be celebrated, equality that is utterly devoid of attention. Once again improvement over Dune which is omasculine, politically futuristic, ethnically domineering, and hugely exemplifying the male savior complex.
There is an astonishing amount of running around (save for Sean Young) which is comparable to a very active episode of Doctor Who, plus I liked Killian as a heroine: she is incredibly persistent, and does not allow red tape to interfere with doing what is right. Sure, the worms may not have been anything to write home about, but the space effects were surprisingly decent probably as good as anything The Asylum has ever produced. If you thought of Dune, you are obviously going to be enormously let down. Hell, even if you thought of Tremors, you are confident going to be disappointed. But as a low-cost B-grade movie, I found this completely acceptable. “Broke into the wrong goddamn space-ship, didn’t you, ya bastard!” I just wish Astrid had yelled that after dealing with one of the worms.
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