Trailer—Shockwave: Darkside

source: Shockwave: Darkside

Graphics suck, but you have to give credit to the actors who had to visualize everything around them. The story line is different and raises a lot of questions that need to be addressed. I am amazed that the critics were so negative. Maybe they have finally recalibrated their critical thinking to high end graphics and special effects. Ignoring the message within. Se La Vie This is not a great movie by any stretch of the imagination, but way better than some that has gained 4 and 5 stars. So if you have nothing better to do on a Saturday Afternoon, ignore the rating and give it a try. You might be a bit surprised.

I had this flick in my queue for a while saving it for when I was in the mood for something different. Going in with very low expectations I was not disappointed. As a cinematic experience it's not pleasant. There were few things about it that appealed to me visually and much of the time my enjoyment was shattered thinking of all of the ways a given scene could have been made better. And I know nothing about cinematography. I grant many concessions because I know it is not a large budget project. But at the same time I don't think the crew made of the most of what they had to work with. Low budget is not an excuse for gratuitous distractions using CGI that is more annoying than supportive. Just when I start to get into the mood of a given situation I get propelled back to the 80s by 16-bit graphics and cheesy sound. Commercial breaks would have been no more destructive. So as a movie in my mind anyway it's a pretty significant failure. Despite the efforts of a decent cast of actors who could be commended for nothing else than sticking it out with the tortured project to the end. (Although an unplanned exit might explain the sudden disappearance of the lead actress in the final act.) As a concept, however, it has a lot to offer. Although the backstory (and the present for that matter) is clumsily presented it is intriguing, and as far as I know is original. In a nutshell, religion has been outlawed on Earth and religious factions have been driven into space where they eke out survival on the moon in separate societies centered around ice mining operations. At some point hubris prevails among the atheists of earth when they plague the environment with runaway nano-technology. Having destroyed the global water supply they now fight the exiled for access to their ice mines. All the while the religious factions are also busy fighting among themselves (of course). In short it is about the waning days of humanity. That is, until... the discovery. Pretty good stuff. In skilled hands it could likely be made into a series of highly regarded hard scifi novels. So I feel it deserves at least 3 stars for that. Only, the terrible screen version is usually made after a novel has made its mark, not before.

If you ignore the bad special effects fight scenes, it has an interesting premise and not to bad a script, I feel it needed a much bigger budget

There is a war for ice/water on the moon. The water on earth has become contaminated and apparently it is easier to find water on the moon than it is to filter an ocean full of it on earth. The battle is between two groups called the Outlaws or Banished and the Unlights with differing religious ideas. A group of the Outlaws (good guys?) are ambushed while in transport and are forced to walk on foot when they make a discovery at the end of the movie in an attempt to justify the bad film we just sat through. This next paragraph will contain plot spoilers/details....The outlaw group has odd religious affiliations such as "Gnostic Islam" and "Hinbuddhist." The science fiction lacks science but not fiction. There is an awful lot of noise being made in a vacuum and a lot of fire without oxygen. The one sixth gravity didn't seem to help anybody walk as they moved as if they were on Earth (most likely where they filmed it.) What they find is something that upsets the religious status quo concept of a creator, or "Almighty Outlaw." Shades of 2001. Then they talk about it in a dimly lit crater and the film ends. BTW The "dark side" of the moon has the same amount of light as any side of the moon. It is simply called that because it always faces away from earth, and we can't see it. You wouldn't get that impression from the movie as the dark side is constantly dark. Guide: F-bomb. No sex or nudity.

Oh, that helmet overlay screen approaches nuisance and I was considering turning the movie off but kept with it. I like small cast movies, I love low budget sci-fi that concentrates on what it means to be human, and this offered both plus reasonable science fiction prediction on space suit functionality and computer interface. The story weaved these all together to a satisfying end. Acting was excellent. Set lighting was realistic as possible. Attention to small details to help build the realism was there. Dialogue defined characters well. All excellence. Problems... the helmet view was annoying and way too often. The satellite antagonist was shown way too often such that the viewer had to wonder what it was doing. All of that "too often" disrupted pacing and would have been better spent further developing the interesting characters. Someone in the chain of making this movie should have slapped the editor or director. They made good use of silent moments with characters on screen, but it seemed a good third of the film is wasted space (no pun intended). I say watch it and suffer through the first half for light character development. It builds into a philosophical questioning that made watching the movie worth the time. Gads. This could have been an excellent movie. Watch it with that consideration.

Big spoilers included to explain plot. I felt sorry for the actors suffering in those pitiful bulky spacesuits throughout the entire film. They did their best with a terrible script. Every bad review was correct. Did you notice the 2 good reviews both used the same phrase in the same manner "thought-provoking?" Clearly must be related to the actors or production staff or crew. Badly written. Bad Plot. Bad direction. It takes 3/4 of the movie to find out what the plot was & what the characters were fighting about. The intros for the characters they flashed on the screen did not make sense nor were they on the screen long enough to read. So we didn't know who was who until near the end. It wasn't until near the end that the character ID's made sense and by then they were mostly dead. The early ID's flashed on screen included their religions affiliations but never told us they were banished to the moon because it was outlawed on earth until the end. Nor did they explain the movie intro speech telling her daughter to walk into a blade. The entire film had the characters walking to nowhere on the moon & getting picked off. We could scarcely determine who each character was with the bulky suits & face plates. The beginning made no sense and only at the end did we learn the war was about religion banished on Earth which also had poisoned water. Those banished were sent to die on the moon. But the banished were able to mine ice for water & the unlit earthlings wanted it. At the end, the supposed reason they believed they could end the war was when they learned the moon had originally been set into its orbit billions of years earlier by some other race with a nuke which proved life on earth was not created by a deity. Thus, nothing for the religions to fight about. But they left it hanging on that hope. A really dumb ending. I think they should have let the character nuke the city of those earthlings who banished & tried to kill them throughout the film & who had poisoned the earth. Truly a bad script & terrible direction. Who wants to see a mindless trek to nowhere on the moon with a bunch of intermittent screen overlays which make no sense while unidentified armies & satellites try to kill them. You have no clue what it is all about since the plot is not explained until the end & you then read about it on Wikipedia to clarify what you wasted your time watching. As a lifelong star trek fan, I take exception to the reviewer who compared this garbage to Star Trek. It is NOTHING like Star Trek. That was the same reviewer who gave this movie top marks. The reviewer must be a child of one of the actors or director set. I cant imagine any adult making such glowing comments about this movie. I am usually quite forgiving of a movie so when I say it's bad. It IS bad. Do yourself a favor & skip this movie. It is really terrible & boring.

I have watched this movie three times now and I have come to some realizations about it. 1- Jay and his team spent YEARS trying to get this movie made. They had a VERY limited budget and yet a feature film was still released. I for one have not done that and I tip my hat to anyone who can. 2- The message and the story Jay is trying to tell is a good one. It's thought provoking and one based on character. 3- Do the effects in this movie look like The Avengers or BvS? No, But with the budget they had it works. Watching independent/low budget films is not like going to your multiplex. As a viewer you need to look at the larger picture. I am excited to see what can be done with a Budget.

It seems that others comments are just fake haters and fake lovers Because how it can be just 1 stars and just 9-10 stars ? and nothing in between ? So let's speak about this ... what i call an ... essay ? Is the movie interesting ? No, it is even very boring Are the actors bad ? Not so, not good sure, but not as bad as asylum movies, they are at least better. The story , which one ? oh yes they was a story ... somewhere, hum ... no, i do not even recall why they are fighting .. just at the end (2mn before the end) they discover that the moon was displaced by a nuke millions years ago .... seriously ??? and ... that's all !!! 1h30mn for that .... Are the special effects good ? may be, back in the 60's they might be excellent, but nowadays not at all.