“Space ain’t nothing but a cruel and unforgiving stretch between places to live.”

Justin’s rating: Where’s Kaylee when you need her? Or Miles O’Brien?

Justin’s review: Can “modest” ever be applied as a positive attribute for a movie? I think it can be, especially for low-budget TV movies that are often tempted to reach for what they can’t actually grab. If Trapped in Space is anything, it’s a modest project that knows what it is and works well within its boundaries.

Somewhat based on a 1949 short story by Arthur C. Clarke, this Scifi Channel flick follows the travails of the Venture, a cargo ship making a routine run to Venus. Along the way, an inexpensive CGI asteroid slams through the ship, and the cowardly captain elects to escape in a shuttle and leave his crew behind.

The five remaining members (plus a little white fluffy doggy) are stuck on the crippled vessel with little oxygen remaining. Even as they scramble trying to fix the ship — they can’t call for help, as their comms are down, and everyone thinks that they were blown up — the survivors have to face the truth that only three of the five can make it to their destination with limited life support. They’ve got 22 hours to decide which of the two will need to go.

And there’s our conflict. This bare-bones, modest ship is the staging ground for a 90-minute drama where everyone’s got to decide the impossible while looking for some way to save the day… or save their skin.

Even before Mr. Asteroid showed up, the Venture crew was pretty high-strung with a lot of friction between the characters. So it doesn’t take much to set them at each other’s throats. This isn’t a bunch of noble Starfleet officers working a problem together; it’s MTV’s Real World thrown over the railings of a cruise ship to bob in the water with two live preservers, hungry sharks, and a lot of self-centered egos at play.

While the constant bickering and yelling got old fast, Trapped in Space’s story and writing is surprisingly decent. Modest, even. The five characters — the volatile engineer, the frazzled first officer, the drunken playboy, the laconic enigma, and the brash cadet — have a bit of dimension to them that’s revealed over the course of the film. The dog is simply there to make us wonder if the filmmakers will be so daring as to kill it before all is said and done.*

With hints of Alien (in the cassette futurism ship design), Lifepod (with the pressure cooker conflict in a small vessel), and Stowaway (with the basic “who dies so the rest of us can live” dilemma), Trapped in Space is one of those quietly entertaining efforts that remains in the orbit of the ’90s. It didn’t blow my mind or anything, but it’s passably entertaining — modest, one would say.

*Surprisingly, yes.

Intermission!

• The title font with a spaceship flying by made me think this was a Star Trek TNG episode for a minute
• Space doggy!
• Suffice to say, this captain does NOT go down with the ship. He does throw the puppy, though.
• “Howard the Coward” is a great nickname
• “He’s a set of lungs we can’t afford.”
• I like the cargo hold set (complete with porn and a corpse!)
• That guy’s manifest tablet is ridiculously huge
• It’s a luau in the bedroom!
• “What a revolting spectacle!”
• “I’m not so sure that I’m one of the good ones.”
• Well, her head exploded. Ew.
• Booby traps! In! Space!
• A nice bit of a twist ending