“I’d say right now order is up by one point with one minute left and chaos has the ball.”

Justin’s rating: When Wing Commander is leagues better, you know that you’ve messed up

Justin’s review: You would think that my affinity for outer space scifi and the relative lack of such films in the early 2000s, I would’ve snapped up Supernova like a discounted vending machine bag of Cheetos. Yet I’ve always given this movie wide clearance for its near-universally bad reviews and sour reputation. I mean, what kind of demented, sad sack of a movie reviewer would ever touch such a guaranteed piece of trash?

Me, apparently. Give enough time, and I guess I’ll wolf anything down. My hope wasn’t that this would be secretly good, but that Supernova’s legendary messy production process would lead to an enjoyably bad film. After all, this is the movie that went through three directors — including Walter Hill and Francis Ford Coppola, believe it or not — before jettisoning their names in favor of a director pseudonym. And what would’ve been a 1998 film ended up coming out in 2000 and being buried alive at the box office. Ain’t nobody was happy with this film.

I’m over here with a grin on my face expecting to be just as dissatisfied after 90 minutes is up.

With light shades of Event Horizon, Supernova tracks a deep space search-and-rescue team that gets an emergency call from a mining colony on a rogue planetoid. Warping in, they lose their captain and find that the moon — and the ship — is being sucked into a giant blue sun. Is it going supernova, as the title suggests? I don’t think so, but it’s not like the movie is going out of its way to clarify this. All we know is that they have to wrap up their business and leap out of there in an 11-minute window between when the engines have recharged and the ship gets sucked in and they all die.

Before all that happens, they have to deal with an unstable colony survivor who’s got some purple science fictiony stuff augmenting his body making him homicidally unstable and virtually invincible. So now we’ve got the worst part of Sunshine going on as well.

As much as I hoped it would be so-bad-it’s-good, Supernova is simply super-boring. It’s a dull plod through an uninteresting storyline without any big hook to keep us watching. The ship is as generic as a late-90s design  as you could get (plenty of curves! and blue, don’t forget the blue!), and what little mystery here dissipates in a fistfight at the end.

And it’s a shame for two reasons. The first is that I’ve always liked the idea of interstellar Coast Guard, as that’s a different angle than the military or exploration angle we usually get with space operas. And the second is that Supernova is loaded with a pretty solid cast. We’ve got James Spader, Angela Bassett, Lou Diamond Phillips, and Robin Tunney, among others. But they’re captive to the whims of a script that seems like it was written by an unimaginative committee and then pureed in a blender. They all seem so miserable, pining for better films and better days.

There’s just so much here that’s inexplicably dumb. What about an “android” that’s stylized after a WWI pilot and looks like it escaped the set of old school Doctor Who? Or a guy who’s aged in reverse just so that he can fool people into thinking that he’s his own son? Or a ship’s computer that exists to spout exposition at every turn? Or the overuse of DRAMATIC SHADOWS that would make Captain Kirk proud? Or the most ham-handed villain who pulls a fast one over on everyone and seduces Tunney’s character despite her being in a committed relationship? Or the uncomfortable and absolutely unnecessary zero gee space sex scenes… in a PG-13 film, no less? Or the fact that one of these scenes digitally recolored Tunney’s body to be Bassett’s because she wouldn’t do a nude scene?

But 2000-era moviegoers weren’t about to be impressed by the meagre scifi trappings, and it’s only aged since then. This is only a 90-minute movie, and I was scratching the wall in boredom by minute 40. There’s no urgency at play, no characters we delight in getting to know, no eye candy, no horror, little action, and no fun twists. It’s Generic Trek: The Space Movie, spat into the faces of any poor suckers that decided that this was a good way to pass an evening. Excuse me while I go find an antibacterial wipe to clean up.

Intermission!

• Nothing like having a computer wake you up out of a dead sleep to argue semantics and play chess
• Violent cartoons were banned by law in the early 21st century
• They have a WWI aviator-styled robot called Flyboy
• The cappy gets fused or something, that looks painful
• EXPOSITION COMPUTER
• If you see space goo, you best go stick your arm right inside of it
• “You know you want it baby” “The only real sin is regret” who is this guy
• Lou Diamond Push-Ups
• This is such a confusing death trap. I think he’s going to be killed by bad editing.
• Robin Tunney… in…. space!
• Lou Diamond Phillips… in…. space!