Project Gemini is a pretty good looking wrapper around a truly terrible gift. Good production values, good sets, good VFX can’t save a movie if the dialog is laughable and the plot nonsensical. This is terrible movie that thinks its profound… which is kind of hilarious. It sometimes ventures into so-bad-its-good territory.
The flick is about an Earth dying from a plant virus. We have discovered a mysterious Sphere and Engine in a cave that date back four billion years, before life existed. To save humanity, we recreate the sphere and engine and find a new planet to colonize… but something goes wrong, the ship goes off course, and there’s a viscous alien cleverly hidden in the dark trying to, I dunno, eat people maybe?
The film is quite derivative of both better and worse films… though maybe its more on equal terms with the bad flicks. You’ve got your Alien, Prometheus, Interstellar, Creature, and a bunch more all mixed up helter-skelter, higgledy-piggledy. Like someone say a bunch of Hollywood films and said “Da, my mozhem eto sdelat.”
Wow, the plot – which makes sense on a surface level read, takes random left turns, leaving you wondering if you missed something. Things… just happen… and they made me think I’d dozed off or had gone to make a sandwich during the setup. I swear there were leaps of logic and whole subplots that come out of nowhere. Was I the dummy or did they leave some really important bits out of the script or on the cutting room floor?
We’re talking about, like, the whole purpose of the mission. And how certain characters die. Or how another gets infected. You know, small things. <insert eye rolling out of socket>
The acting is TERRIBLE. I was wondering if this was bad acting or if the English dialog was no the actors’ first language. Maybe they were reciting dialog phonetically… or if the whole movie is just dubbed (it didn’t LOOK dubbed, but maybe it sounded dubbed?). I looked it up and it’s an English-language Russian film… so that’s two humanitarian disasters this year. Spasibo, Russia. Spasibo.
The movie also has a bunch of ill-timed and poorly inserted flashbacks that usually don’t add much to the movie. Sometimes they are confusing because there’s a cave set on Earth and one on the alien world… and the script is so muddled that there’s a distinct possibility that the flashback is just happening now and they brought all the equipment from the earth and forgot to tell us. If that makes any sense.
It’s never a good sign when you either laugh maniacally at bad dialog or just yell, “What?!?!” at the screen instead. This is just a disaster of plot, a mixed-up nonsensical story that zigs and zags in confusing non-linear and malapropistic (if that’s a word) ways. The number of times things just… happen… is almost impressive. But it’s also one hell of a stinkeroo. Stay away from this sci-fi gobbledeygook mashup. Unless you want to laugh at so-bad-its-good grade Z nonsense… then there’s fun to be had.
Score: 54