Most of the reviews of this movie came around the time it made its debut. Now it's a dozen years later... and this piece of trash sure hasn't aged well.But even if this were opening day, this absolutely abysmal movie would still rank as one of the worst in history.It starts out with some of the worst acting I've ever seen, people sitting around a conference table at a major corporation. I swear it looks like the director or producer just decided to cut costs and have his friends and family fill in for real actors. One can really appreciate good acting when one sees the complete opposite.The worst, most ill-conceived character is the Sergeant aboard the space ship. His dialogue is contradictory nonsense. I couldn't believe my ears. It was stupefying. Maybe standards for movie making were more lax back then, but his was incomprehensible.All the characters are cartoonish, the acting is horrendous, and the amateurish "plot" is just an embarrassment to anyone who loves good movies. This one insults our intelligence at every turn.As you probably know, this movie is about the (grim) future when we need to exploit space for raw materials. One massive company is losing all their moon mining operations to pirates. Their cargo shuttles, full of raw materials, go missing. Therefore, they need to find out what's going on, or the company will lose everything.That could be an interesting premise for a movie, but not the way it was done here. Every lame cliché was put to dutiful use, every cookie cutter character was used. Nothing worthy of our time or attention. This was paint by numbers, and sloppily done.This is by no means some elitist review. I love movies of all sort. I wasn't looking for some intellectual "art house" film. This review is negative because the entire film, from start to finish, is just a horrid waste of our time.

This movie is a quotation after quotation of James Cameron's Aliens (1986)... or better said copy, rip off, stealing. Or, how do they call it now... "remake", "homage". Yes, if you like some movie and its (virtual) reality, you'd like to spend more of your time "in it", but you can do it creatively (invent your own sci-fi world, or your own story, or your own extrapolation of the story), but you don't copy everything word by word, scene by scene. Scene of the spaceship approaching planet (repeated more than three times of course), tough soldiers, colony on the planet, Ripley character, Hicks character, Newt-like character, Burke character, elevator scene, what more do we miss...? An alien! Roland Emmerich is good at copying movies, but I prefer cocktails like Indepenedence Day - where more famous movies and their features are blended into one VFX spectacle. This small movie is not even a B-category. I developed a category of his own, for Mr. Director. Regarding the "gay interest"... what do you mean? The wannabe-homoerotic electricity between Felix and Jake character? Yes, we all do dream :) Or the rape scene in the showers? Homosexuality = rape? Sexuality = violence? I might call it a hidden not-slightly homophobic remark...

If "Moon 44" deserves to be remembered, it's for authentic atmosphere. It breathes 80's style SF realism, a cross between "Aliens" and "Blade Runner" -- did they pilfer Deckard's living room interior for their company headquarters scenes, by the way? Look closely...It was Roland Emmerich's first genre movie before "Independence Day", and the two share the same flaws. Yes, it is full of stereotypes and the end is cheesy, by "B-movie" standards, but it also has some good drama and an interesting mix of characters. The real letdown is Michael Paré as the pretty face/mercenary hero -- a little more depth to his bleak and boring character might have improved the ratings. The main assets of the film are its visuals, they make for a totally believable outer space "mining" colony. This is a rather low budget production, but you don't see it. With some refinement to the story, and a few long shots and explosions more, it might have come out really good. This is one of those films that make you wonder, what if.

There is no reason on earth to watch this testosterone driven pile of pseudo homo-erotic horse cookies masquerading as an SF movie. The story could have been written on the back of a postage stamp (but is credited to have taken FOUR people to concoct). The visuals are totally derivative; take Alien, Outland, bits of Blade Runner, shove through blender. The acting is abysmal. Not even McDowell can summon up the effort to be interested in his lines and he can usually be counted on to have some fun with his roles.If you do watch this movie after reading the trashing it gets on the IMDb there are some rewards to be got from it. It's one of those movies that lets you sit there and ask yourself questions like: What are the teenage whizz kid navigators actually FOR? All they do is say "Go faster!" or "Go up!" I mean if the muscle-bound ex-prisoner fighter pilots can't work out that crashing into canyon walls in a speeding helicopter is not a good idea then they are even thicker than they look (and boy do they look thick - physically as well as mentally. Where did these guys learn to fly? - The Charles Atlas Fight School of dynamic tension?).As it turns out, these guys ARE as thick as two short planks because, having been told that their lives are in the hands of their teenage navigators they seem to think it's a good idea to anally rape one of them in the shower. Not clever.Other questions you might like to ask yourself include why ALL the doors in this movie give off huge spurts of steam every time they open, or close. In fact, why does _everything_ in this movie give off great spurts of steam? Everywhere people go on the mining station steam shoots out at them from walls, doors, ceilings, and floor - even, unbelievably, the cockpit of a shuttle craft. They have steam lines in the cockpits of shuttle craft? Steam powered spaceships? Wow! Welcome to the future! In fact the only place where there is no steam to be seen is in the kitchens, the only place you would EXPECT to see it. It's that kind of dumb stupid movie. There must have been at least 3 guys on set whose only job was to fire off fire extinguishers at random - and stoke the smoke machine. There is an awful lot of smoke in this movie.It also has that standard shot of space ship approaching planet. You know the one. Static peaceful planet swimming in space. Suddenly there is ominous music and from the side of the frame comes a metallic something which just keeps on going and going, getting bigger and bigger, a vast 3 mile long pile of plastic glued together to look like a spaceship, on and on it comes until the glowing bits at the back finally come into shot with a sound cue of jet enginey noises. Finally with this movie I worked out what has always bugged me about that shot. If the engines are blasting away like that it means the the ship is accelerating towards the planet. Surely anything having crossed interstellar space would be DEcelerating as it approached its destination. Standard operating procedure for that would mean that the ship should be approaching the planet arse first with its engines going - unless they were blasting out Suckions an as yet undiscovered form of anti-acceleratonic particle. Christ I was bored.If for nothing else I will be grateful for this movie for being so vacant of anything worth watching or caring about that it gave me time to think that one out.Worst Line: "I got fed up with talking to my French fries."