Watched this movie for the first time last night after picking it up cheap on DVD. It was the scif-fi/horror genre mix which I don’t particularly like (started a thread on that subject once!) but it kept me moderately entertained for a couple of hours.
I did wonder about one aspect of the film though, when the explorers first enter the abandoned spaceship they notice footprints in the dust on the lower-level, which is odd as they’re supposed to be the first people to have entered the ship in hundreds of years.
However this is never really followed up on or mentioned again, I’m I missing something? It couldn’t, or at least shouldn’t, have been the sphere causing hallucinations because nobody had entered it at that point in the film.
Well I don’t remember the film in detail, but in the novel at that point they don’t know yet that it is a human ship from the future(just that it is a ship) so the human footprints in the dust give the whole thing a strange mood. Only later do we find out it is a human built ship from the future.
Its entirely possible the sphere was creating objects even before they were inside.
I knew pretty much nothing of the story before watching it but my first reaction on seeing the interior of the ship was, “That’s human made”, so it wasn’t a real surprise when we find out its from the future. An example of good set design I suppose.
But I agree, the story had potential but lost its way when they found the alien artefact, an unfortunate tendency for too many science-fiction films, begin with an interesting premise but descend to cheap shock-horror tricks.
True, but its not really well clarified in the story and seems one of those ‘its science fiction so we can do pretty much what we want with no thought to internal story logic’ things.
IIRC the whole situation was a time loop thing, the footprints were their own footprints made while they were/will be exploring the ship from the previous loop.
Right, but to me, the spaceship was far more interesting than the sphere. A vessel chock full of future technology, with centuries of future history stored in its databases, would interest me a lot more than some dumb floating deus ex machina. And yet, as soon as the cast discovered the sphere, they forgot all about the ship. What gives?
Really? Not saying you’re wrong, in fact it would explain the footprints, but I don’t recall anything in the film to suggest that was the case.
Indeed, in a coincedence I read his book Prey shortly before seeing the movie, he was a remarkably bland sci-fi story-teller for someone so famous. Not bad to be fair but very ordinary.
Agreed, they could have made a much more interesting film without the addition of the alien sphere at all. Although if it had to be part of the story they could have done its mystery and ‘alienness’ (for lack of a better word) much better.
Personally I’m really tired of, and don’t really understand, the whole close connection between science-fiction and horror in the movies, its certainly not present to the same extent in books.
If I recall correctly, it’s totally believable. Both the message and the translation are created by Harry. The message, subconsciously, as something that he can figure out, and the translation when he figures it out. The translation that he shows the others is one that he’s modified to change the name, and he goes through enough iterations of possible meaning that people aren’t checking every single keystroke in his final translation.
Then he writes the computer program that sends and displays the messages. Not very hard to look for “HARRY” and replace with “JERRY” in the output, rather than doing a faithful substitution of numbers for letters. No one double checks his work for quite a while because there’s an alien sphere to talk to. Much more compelling.
The only aspect of the movie involving time-travel is the movement of the ship itself from circa 2050 to around 1790, and even that isn’t really mentioned again.
I can’t say whether there was any other actual time travel, but they did get stuck in a few apparent, likely illusionary, loops when they were trying to escape.
As I recall they find the ship, it’s been there for centuries, they go on board, there’s something odd about the ship - eventually they realise that it’s not, as preciously thought, an alien space craft but a space ship of Earth origin that ended up on the seabed.
And they [the team] were the crew who put it there, some time in the future, or the past.
I seem to remember at the end there are only two of them left and they swear not to tell anyone the truth about the ship, but they forget the truth anyways for some reason.
Dammit, now I’m going to have to rent it and check!!
I just read the book last night. I do not remember these footprints.
While I have not a good re-memory, I was already convinced that the best answer would be a human ship from the future. So it is hard to believe I would have missed this.
Maybe I skipped a page, but I think it was just a simple boo boo, like when you see jeep tracks in the sand in a movie about biblical times.
I’m intending to watch the movie tonight to find out why it was so badly received.
It seems to have been a little sloppy from what I’ve seen on this thread.
Not a one of you seems to understand the story as it was written.
A pretty good sci-fi / psych thriller if you ask me.
The sphere would have been hard to render as meaningfully as described. The pattern of it’s markings was by definition indescribably inhuman and hinting at meaning without conveying any.
There is only one time loop in the book and none of the characters was ever involved.
The ship was likely unmanned originally, but Creighton seems to have not been clear on that.
Anyone making comments here before me, who likes SF or this movie, really ought to read the book.
I can hardly believe that anyone tried seriously to film a story so dependent on people’s thoughts, esp. the lead character’s, in the first place.
It almost has to be total camp.
