Movie Review: Supernova (2000)

The movie stars James Spader, Lou Diamond Phillips, Angela Bassett, Robert Forster and Peter Facinelli.

I recorded this film off of one of our movie channels a couple weeks ago because it sounded somewhat interesting and, deciding to watch a science fiction film a couple nights ago, ended up picking this movie to watch with my wife. Unfortunately, it just wasn't as good as the description made it sound.

The film, in all fairness, did have some potential, mostly because the overall plot was somewhat intriguing. Basically, you have a mysterious young man (Facinelli) who appears to be keeping some sort of secret, especially about what happened to the rest of the mining crew, and is obsessed with the alien artifact to the point he is willing to do anything to keep it.

On top of it, because of the dimensional jump the ship had to make to get to the mining colony and an accident caused by debris when they arrived, they are low on fuel and have only a small opportunity to escape before being pulled into the supernova. This had the potential to create some additional suspense because the ship couldn't leave right away and had a limited amount of time to escape.

The problem with this film is the execution. For lack of a better description, this movie is just plain dull. Unimportant scenes (such as preparing for their dimensional jump) are dragged out and there's an awful lot of talking and not a whole lot of action for the majority of the film. Not to mention, there's so much gratuitous nudity early on in this movie, I thought I accidentally picked out a soft core porn film. This, of course, should have been my first clue this movie wasn't worth watching considering most films that have weak scripts resort to this.

As I said before, this film had some potential. But, it fails to make full use of that potential and, mostly because the majority of the movie tends to drag on, was a film I just did not enjoy watching as much as I thought I would. I would recommend passing on this one if you get a chance to watch it.

My Grade: D