Stranded

Stranded is no blockbuster, but it manages to pass the time better than most of them have done in this summer of discontent.

The actors work hard to make us feel their fear of a creature that, for much of the movie, we don’t get to see. We don’t really need to see it, because we’ve seen it or something like it before.

The kind of middling thriller you might stop to watch if you came across it on cable, director Roger Christian’s “Alien” knockoff is presumably only in theaters because Christian Slater’s contract demanded it.

A no-budget "Alien" ripoff with little reason to exist beyond the few creature-effects shots its design team now can add to its reel, Roger Christian's Stranded might leave viewers yearning for the director's "Battlefield Earth" -- a film that, terrible though it was, at least couldn't be accused of a lack of ambition.

Stranded stops at being merely seriously dull and trite, rather than tipping into train-wreck silliness.

It’s a scrappy, unpretentious movie, with nicely calibrated pacing, but there’s no logic, little motivation and above all, no personalities.

Trite dialogue, stock characters, and bad-to-middling special effects make Stranded more tedious than scary or nerve-wracking.

[SPOILER ALERT: This review contains spoilers.]

This is badly written and directed by Roger Christian (Battlefield Earth), and the actors are completely tortured by the bad manuscript. The alien is quite OK though, as is the film score in an extreme low budget movie you should avoid if you're not a **** for bad movies.

The opening scene made it seem as if the movie would be action-packed, but within a few syllables, it became clear that none of the actors were going to try to bring the stiff and poorly-contrived script to life. No effort was put toward researching space or science, and less still toward making the characters sympathetic or interesting. Frankly, the first 'symptom' I expected to see of the lone female's alien infection was that she'd want to sleep with every male aboard the ship, because it was that painfully cliched and clunky in its portrayal of that female, as well as its portrayals of sanity, alcoholism, space travel, technology, and basically all of the subject matter in the movie (though that short list about sums it up, if every one of those things was described by a third-grader who had no concept of them). The soundtrack is one I'm fairly sure I've heard before while listening to Apple's GarageBand pre-made music loops library. The 'remarkably stupid lady we're supposed to buy as a scientist gets pregnant with alien horror' plot was boring when Prometheus did it, but they at least had Michael Fassbender. By the end of the movie, I was rooting for all of the characters to die simply because they deserved it by being so utterly stupid. The writers project a future grimmer than Idiocracy, if that's supposed to represent the scientists who would be chosen for such an operation-- especially considering the amount of emotional and mental instability prevalent in this crew of jackasses even before the alien spores appear to make them into grotesque parodies of craziness.