DARK PLANET (1997)

 

PHENOMENALITY: *marvelous*
MYTHICITY: *poor*
FRYEAN MYTHOS: *drama*
CAMPBELLIAN FUNCTION: *cosmological*

SPOILERS SPOILERS SPOILERS

DARK PLANET has received a number of critiques for director Albert Magnoli's having shot too many scenes in partial darkness. I've had similar criticisms of other films, but Magnoli's use of partial-dark scenes didn't bother me, since I think he was pretty good at highlighting the faces of the four main actors-- even if they weren't given very many good lines by the three writers, one of whom was Buzz Dixon, famed for various cult cartoon-shows.

The setup had potential. On a far-future Earth, but one which has not yet managed to colonize any planets despite mastering space-travel, two factions have been fighting for decades. One faction is comprised of humans who have been genetically modified, the Alphas, while the other group is unmodified. Curiously, the latter group is termed "The Rebels," as if the non-modified types at some time might have been ruled by the enhanced Alphas. But the underwritten script never elaborates on the genesis of the Rebels' group cognomen, any more than it's at all clear about what sort of things the modified humans can do, with the exception of one character, a telepath. 

For reasons not outlined until the last half hour, the Alphas and Rebels institute an armistice. The authorities on both sides designate a joint task force to make a landing on the so-called "Dark Planet," which implicitly is known through artificial probes. Said world can theoretically be reached by piloting a spacecraft through a wormhole, and that's never been accomplished before-- except by one man.

Though the task force is roughly ten soldiers from both sides, only four characters are important. The Alphas are represented by the conscienceless military commander Winter (Michael York) and his telepathic subordinate Salera (Maria Ford), while the only Rebel of consequence is an officer named Brendan (Harley Jane Kozak). Standing between these uneasy allies is Hawke (Paul Mercurio), a non-enhanced human who was arrested by the Alphas for weapons smuggling. While fleeing pursuit, Hawke drove his spacecraft into a wormhole and managed to emerge with his life, though another crewmember, Hawke's wife, perished for unexplained reasons. The Alpha-Rebel alliance drafts Hawke to be their navigator in order to reach the Dark Planet, though no one speaks as to why this mission is so important.

I'll give the Big Reveal away now: the Planet Earth is due to become uninhabitable in two years, thanks to bioweapons unleashed by both factions. Winter and Brendan both know that they must colonize the one human-friendly world in order for humankind to survive, and yet both officers have contingency plans to ace out the other group, which doesn't make a lot of sense given that the allied authorities back on Earth would still be in charge of who gets to emigrate to the new world. 

Hawke, in theory, is the random element. Despite Paul Mercurio's weirdly downplayed performance, Hawke professes a belief in the primacy of human instinct, and he attempts to win over the repressed Salera with rather ham-handed advances. Hawke more or less throws in with the sympathetic Brendan rather than the despicable Winter, but all three characters are too sketchy to provide much drama. The action isn't strong, though Winter has both a brief throw-down with the rebellious Salera and an end-battle out in space, with Winter and Hawke fighting one another in spacesuits. By virtue of such scenes, PLANET is a combative film.

Despite playing a flat character, York is the only actor who's a pleasure to listen to even when the dialogue is bad. Kozak, Mercurio and Ford, whatever their talents in other productions, are incapable of transcending the banal script. 

Keith Bailey's site not only reviews the movie, but also conveys the experience of a writer, Bill Vellaly, assigned to the project but excluded from the final credits. (Actually, the aforementioned Buzz Dixon is only credited on the movie's IMDB page.) I don't know if Vellaly's concept for the script would have made a better film, but PLANET remains damned underwhelming in its final form.