2016-02-04

20160204: Action Review--Survivor





Name: Survivor (Sternenkrieger) (2014)
IMDb: link to Survivor page

Genres: Action   Country of origin: USA

Cast: Danielle Chuchran as Kate Mitra, Kevin Sorbo as Captain Hunter, Rocky Myers as Rogan.

Written, directed, and produced by: John Lyde.

The Three Acts:

The initial tableaux: 
Earth has been made unlivable.  Seven colony ships left Earth, each looking for a new planet on which to live.  The film starts in one of those ships, and it has long since lost contact with the others.  Further, after 47 years, the original crew is gone except for Captain Hunter.  Half a dozen teens spend much of their time training in combat.

Kate finds a wormhole to a possibly feasible planet.  The captain gets convinced.  So the ship heads through, only to encounter disaster in a space born rock field.  The captain and some of the teens survive the crash of their space ship.

Delineation of conflicts:
The humans are not alone on their new planet.  There are some humanoids with blades and guns, but also some bipedal monsters.  The monsters like to kill members of the other groups.  The humanoids bicker among themselves, and decide, on the whole, not to like the newcomers.

The Captain gets seriously wounded early on, and holes up with his radio.  The teens except Kate get killed or captured soon after planetfall.  So, most of the film is Kate against the world and its natives.

One of the dissenters among the humanoids, Rogan, might lend her a hand, but her finely honed battle training does not seem to recognize that.  He rescues her three times, she tries to kill him four times.

Resolution:
There are not all that many directions for this elimination derby can go.  In any case, rest assured that Kate gets to run a lot.

One line summary: PC cliche meets scifi cliches.

Statistics:

Cinematography: 7/10 Most of the film is shot well, and the Utah desert is stark and beautiful to look at.  The costume design is fairly ridiculous.

Sound: 6/10 I could hear the actors.  The florid background music was more or less irrelevant.

Acting: 3/10 There was one actor, Kevin Sorbo, and a host of extras.  The extras did a lot of running, fighting, and dying.

Screenplay: 1/10 Derivative, badly done, absurdly not feasible on so many fronts.  A show about a non-interesting lead running through brush and rocks in the desert is not engaging.

Final rating: 2/10

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