"Das Arche Noah Prinzip" or "The Noah's Ark Principle" is a West German German-language film by writer and director Roland Emmerich, still one of Germany's biggest stars in Gollywood more than three decades later. This is actually one of his earliest works as a filmmaker and he was not even close to famous at that point. Not surprising though as he was still in his late 20s. This 100-minute movie is probably the most known work from actor Richy Müller. But it's nowhere near Emmerich's most known of course as he was still pretty young here and also because this movie is in German language, so not as easily accessible for Hollywood. It takes at the end of the 20th century and looking at how this movie was from the 1980s, it wasn't even that far away actually. But I never thought that this was a realistic example of what life may be like 15 years later, which means that the film is almost worthless in terms of realism. It is more of a dark vision and fantasy mostly. I may be a bit biased as I never liked SciFi too much, but I still expect better quality than this. I also found most of the actors really forgettable, but can you really blame them looking at how poorly their characters were written. A good way to describe this film would be science-fiction for the sake of it. I cannot say I enjoyed the watch at all and there is really nothing memorable about this one. I also would not call it a disaster or a failure, but it lacks in way too many areas to let me recommend it. Pretty boring and only for the most hardcore SciFi fans. Everybody else should skip.

This is truly the worst film I have ever watched.I liked the cover, so i took it from the video rental shop. Big mistake. Everyone this evening was blaming me for wasting 2h of their life.The real hard thing is... i watched this movie, and I just didn't understood the story. It was confusing and had no red line. At the end of the film I didn't knew the film was about... the only thing i knew was, there was a space station.Roland Emmerich did nice Jobs with "Independence Day" or "Godzilla"... but this one was really awful. Calling this film "the German 'Star Wars'" is offending everything German.

Studying in Berlin in 1984, I attended a packed first screening of this film, billed as "Der Deutsche Star Wars." I was astonished at how childishly executed the film was. It seemed to have a single special effect, space station scaffolding rumbling past camera(sound in space?), re-used 7 times. I counted. The plot was equally thin. CIA world domination, love story, bad marriage, predictable lines. pacing excruciatingly slow. The audience that day was equally unimpressed, so it wasn't just me.Happily, the director went on to make real eye candy with decent budgets.

The year is 1997, and World Peace seems to have come, with most classic weapons of mass destruction having been abandoned. However, orbiting the Earth there is the European/American space station FLORIDA ARKLAB, capable of controlling the weather at any location on the planet underneath. A civil project by nature, it might be abused as an offensive weapon, since it could deliver devastation to any potential adversary simply by creating natural disasters such as storms and floods. No wonder the space station soon becomes the central point in rising political tensions between East and West, next stop World War 3 (as indicated by the German tagline (transl.) "The end of our future has already begun"). We're following the main protagonist Billy Hayes, an astronaut aboard the station, as he wades through a plot of secrecy and sabotage trying to tell friend from foe in the process. This film is the first "real" movie by Roland Emmerich, and knowing his later works, it is, simply speaking, surprisingly good. First off, it was and is a visual treat by any standard, with well-crafted models and a set-design that made a point in trying to look as realistic as possible. At that, it is visually reminiscent of many other movies from that era (Star Wars or Moonraker, to name some), but doesn't fail nearly as badly as some of them do; it simply looks good. And what's more, this movie has a story that makes some sense and won't let you leave your seat until it is resolved. The acting is good, the characters are well drawn and partly are in for some surprise. The general mood is by no means optimistic, this is definitely a Cold War scenario, which nowadays of course has the tendency to make you chuckle, considering that 1997 looked totally different than portrayed in the movie.Bottom line: if you know later Emmerich blockbusters such as ID4 and Godzilla, you definitely notice his handwriting in this one, and seeing the path he took from here on makes sense. But much unlike said later works, this movie excells not only in the audio and CGI department, but also has something like characters and storyline. People liked ID4 as a cineastic lollipop, but as a film, this one is far better than most