2013 Stranded

• Director: Roger Christian
• Writers: Roger Christian, Christian Piers Betley
• Stars: Christian Slater, Brendan Fehr, Amy Matysio, Michael Therriault
• Runtime: 1 Hour, 24 Minutes
• Trailer Link: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cf8O8BvaFcY

Spoiler-Free Judgment Zone

Four astronaut miners on a moon base get clobbered by meteors. Which would be bad enough by itself, but the meteors bring an alien lifeform that dials the peril and body horror up high. Miscommunication and bad choices help move the somewhat predictable plot along, but the effects are good as is the acting. The sum total is a pretty good movie that Kevin was more entertained by than Brian.

Spoilery Synopsis

We open on the moonbase ARK, with four crew. It’s day 187 of the one-year mission. There’s an incoming meteor storm, and it blasts the base. The rocks keep falling, and there’s lots of damage. Commander Gerard Brockman wants to evacuate back to Earth, but suddenly, a meteor hits them right in the control room. Credits roll.

They all work on damage control for a while. Ava Cameron goes into the damaged section to seal a leak, and she finds a piece of a meteor embedded in a machine. That goes badly, but she does bring a piece of the meteor back to the inhabitable area; it’s got an unusual spore on it.

It’s going to be several days before an evacuation ship arrives, so they have to patch up whatever’s left. The spore starts growing, and it’s obviously of alien origin. Ava works with the spore, and she’s got a cut on her hand, so we know where this is heading now. She almost immediately starts feeling weird but doesn’t tell anyone.

Bruce and Lance find her and examine her; she’s suddenly very pregnant. They put her into a very loose kind of isolation. The thing inside her grows very fast and she has nightmares. Then the real thing comes out, and it’s even worse. This brings about lots of arguing about what to do next.

Ava wakes up to find some kind of monstrous baby feeding from her, and she doesn’t react well. It bites Bruce and runs off. Lance insists that Bruce and Ava are hallucinating from the bad air in the place. Bruce starts hallucinating that he’s infected as well after the bite. We see the creature growing and mutating into something fully grown and humanoid; it looks like Bruce, only naked and slimy.

Bruce keeps imagining seeing the alien creature, but no one believes him. He unties Ava from the “quarantine” room and lets her out. Gerard finds out and sedates her, but not before she stabs him with a scalpel. Meanwhile, the alien doppelganger kills Bruce, makes it look like a suicide, and steals his clothes.

Lance finds Bruce’s body at the same time Gerard is attacked… by Bruce. They have no choice but to release Ava to help them find the alien. The alien then traps Lance in an airlock and he gets blasted out on a very slow timer.

Gerard and Ava decide that now that there’s only the two of them that they can take the escape pod. This requires all manner of running around and packing supplies.

Soon, there’s a big three-way brawl, and the alien gets in the escape pod, launching in one minute. Can they stop it? No– the rocket blasts off toward Earth.

With only 17 minutes left to live, the escape shuttle arrives. Can they run to the shuttle with no air for three-and-a-half minutes?

We cut to Earth, where the escape pod has landed. There’s no one inside and no tracks. Not far away, the creature is mutating again…

Brian’s Commentary

These may be the dumbest space-people who ever lived. None of them know what “quarantine” means. They know there’s something alive on the base, but they all keep pretending it isn’t. Ava gets infected by an alien spore and doesn’t report it at all.

The acting is fine, the sets are good, and the creature effects are effective. The overall plot, however, requires all the characters to make every stupid decision in the book. It’s pretty predictable and more than a little dull after it gets going.

Kevin’s Commentary

It starts right out with the meteor clobbering and doesn’t let up with one damn thing after another.

For a group of astronauts isolated on a base who would have been highly vetted and trained, they don’t communicate well, and they make some dumb decisions.

The pluses outweighed the negatives overall, though, and I was more entertained than not.