Escape Velocity
Escape Velocity
| 28 November 1999 (USA)
Escape Velocity Trailers

A psychotic spaceman takes over a deep-space observatory manned by a scientist, his wife, and their teenage daughter.

Reviews
arcturus9

Getting lost in space frozen for 15 years, that's unlikely. Falling into a star... improbable. Falling into it the day it goes supernova and explodes... ludicrous. Getting rescued by a ship just then... priceless.No, it's not Zaphod Beeblebrox's Heart of Gold to the rescue. It's also not the Parent of the Year awardees. After sentencing her daughter to two years' solitary confinement on an abandoned spaceship, the mother encourages her to get drunk and wander off alone with the strange man they've picked up. This foreshadows their prowess in hand to hand combat, which makes up most of the film's action. Combat highlights include for example the psycho talking close up face to face with one woman while blindly pointing the gun behind him at the other about six inches away, who obligingly simpers in the line of fire.In the end, the family of three abandons the metropolis-sized ship they were planning to use to observe the supernova until the last instant because it is too slow to escape the blast wave, instead using the psycho's fighter ship which they've refueled in one minute with 1600 pounds of gas propellant from a 0.7-kiloton missile. You have to love those hard sci-fi statistics! As long as Hollywood treats writing as an irrelevant frill, they'll continue making movies not fit to run at 3 am on the Sci fi channel.

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iamluvd

Ok...watch this movie and just have fun! There are a lot of things that the audience could pick apart - like the ridiculously long space ship, or the countless meaningless shots of empty corridors, or the sometimes 'campy' dialog. AND...I can't leave out the irritating character of the daughter, Ronnie. She whines and whines and ...ok, you get the picture. BUT...Wendy Crewson is great! It is such fun to see her as the tough gal with a gun! It proves again, that this fabulous actress can turn just about any role into a gem. She is gutsy and sexy, and even manages to be convincingly maternal with her whiney daughter. That alone should have guaranteed her an academy award nod! Don't expect "Aliens"...just expect an evening of entertainment. This little film can deliver that.

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Alan Deikman (Alan-40)

Don't let the fact that this is set in a space station orbiting a star about to go nova fool you. This is a low tech story. Their ship is huge, but for no apparent purpose other than to provide a lot of corridors in which to play cat and mouse. The conflicts are solved with 1980's vintage firearms and in some cases a knife.This movie bounces between some great parts and many that make absolutely no sense whatsover. I like the characters; the actors are excellent at making them work. But what kind of mom thinks its the right thing to do for a 16 year old daughter to get over her fathers death is to spend nearly two years in an isolated space station? No contact with anyone but her mom and stepdad-to-be. By the time a guy shows up the poor kid is so horny that she damn near mounts him even before he comes out of cryo-stasis! (This happens on her 18th birthday, which mom forgot about.)The inevitable fight sequences is where the movie works best. Enjoy it for that and forget the rest.

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MordredW

A pretty average scifi film. The plot was more or less obvious from the start. Although the acting was reasonably good, the writing seemed very cliched, using ideas taken from numerous films.The basic plot: Scientists working on a deep space research platform rescue a fighter from crashing into the red dwarf that they have been orbitting. Onboard they find a stasis pod, which coincidently malfunctions at that very moment. After 2 or 3 minutes of the man in the pod waking up, you realise that he is a complete lunatic. Something which totally escapes the 3 person crew of the research ship...After that it becomes a rip off every other film involving a psychotic madman terrorising innocent victims, overall I think Speed 2 was a better exploration of the subject matter, which I didn't consider to be a good film either.Not a good film, get Aliens out and watch that again.

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