Rated: M
Directed by: Edward Drake
Written by: Edward Drake and Corey Large
Produced by: Corey Large
Starring: Frank Grillo, Bruce Willis, Brandon Thomas Lee, Perrey Reeves, Corey Large, Lochlyn Munro.
A sci-fi action movie that lacked a good hook and in the end, missed the mark.
Cosmic sin: When a species makes a pre-emptive strike, to commit genocide and wipe out an entire race – to stop a war that hasn’t begun…
A task General James Ford (Bruce Willis) has already had practice, wiping out 70 million souls when a colonised planet wanted to separate from the Alliance.
Cosmic Sin is a sci-fi that leaps through the years from 2031, the first colonisation of Mars, through to 2524 when humans make First Contact with an alien species.
‘We may not be alone in the universe,’ says Lt Fiona Ardene (Adelaide Kane), one of the only believable characters in the film.
Ethnologist Dr. Lea Goss (Perry Reeves) wants to know if the contact was positive or negative?
First contact was not positive.
Hence General Eron Ryle (Frank Grillo) making the call, bringing in the Blood General, in case they need to drop another Q-Bomb, to not just stop a war but to save the human race.
The clock ticks as minutes pass since first contact while a rag-tag team is put together to follow radio-active tracing back to the alien’s home planet.
To fight to save humanity.
It gets a little dramatic shown in the conversations between the team members provoking a feeling of forced sentiment that didn’t go anywhere because it was all glossed over, the emotion relying on strings in the soundtrack and some knowing eye contact.
I guess what you’d expect from an action movie, but I wanted more meat with this storyline of making First Contact – not just an immediate: us versus them.
It felt contrived: the honking horns, machine guns, smoking cigarettes.
The dialogue missed the mark as well, with only a rare moment of light-hearted exchange, mostly from the Bruce Willis character, ‘I’m just thinking,’ says his side-kick Dash, (Corey Large), who both wants to fight and buy his general a drink.
To which Ford replies, ‘Did it hurt?’
The effects were OK, with space ship battles like red laser tag while the team shot past in armoured space-suits.
The film was shot using Sony Venice cameras at 6K with Zeiss Master Anamorphic lenses. The look of the film made by, “‘baking in’ a high contrast photographic look into the raw files, thus allowing the colorists to dial in the films primary colors: black and magenta.”
But the story felt choppy, like another draft was needed. And the forced emotion, l have to say, made me cringe.