Aurora

Dir: Christopher Kulikowski

1998

*

Aurora sees a handful of Astronauts crash land on a desert planet and struggle through heat and rough terrain in order to find refuge and water. It's a story that had been told before and has been told since and pretty much every other version of this story has been told better. I don't want to be mean about Christopher Kulikowski's film because it would be like kicking sand in the face of the skinny kid at school who had all the allergies and in all honesty it could be a lot worse given the small budget but that is no excuse for the terrible script. The acting isn't the worst I've ever seen either, David Jean Thomas being quite good in fact. The story really does meander on and pretty much nothing happens but you do start to feel the men's struggle, I was convinced by their pain and in places I did start to feel the heat. It's just a shame that the characters were badly written and the CGI is of the worst quality. It often looks like a spoof of a Yes album cover but not as funny as that sounds. It still could have been a great b-movie had the script and character been a little more interesting. They certainly missed out on a good scene when the characters decided to get drunk one evening. Drunken Astronauts is not something you should enter into lightly and for me it was one wasted opportunity too many.