Project Gemini (2022)

"Makes PROMETHEUS look like INTERSTELLAR"

Oh yes, we're in dodgy SF movie territory indeed with PROJECT GEMINI, a Russian-Cypriot co-production that's strong on CGI effects but lacking in pretty much everything else.

The film kicks off with a somewhat flatly delivered info dump revealing a plague is killing the earth's vegetation and the planet has reached crisis point. The only way humankind can survive is to travel to a distant solar system and terraform a new planet using some kind of life-generating sphere archaeologists have found two of in a cave somewhere and which are thought to be responsible for life starting on earth. Or something.

Off our intrepid crew of seven men and one woman shoot into space. They pass through a rift (or something) and end up in the wrong place. The captain accuses his navigator of putting in the wrong coordinates and asks him to 'go and check the engine', which the navigator does before killing himself, presumably from embarrassment at either his mistake or more likely from being in this film. Meanwhile the Mysterious Ancient Sphere they have brought with them has been leaking some weird goo that promises to turn into a gloopy alien but actually doesn't. 

And that's only the start of what's wrong with PROJECT GEMINI, a film that boasts breathtaking CGI but that's about it for the positives. Acting is leaden and not helped at all by ponderous dubbing. Characterisation is non-existent to the point that each person in this could be a chicken with a dubbed on voice and it couldn't possibly be any worse. The plot is perfunctory and the dialogue sounds like what you'd get from five year olds playing spacemen during the school lunch hour. In fact so poor is it all that it had me hankering for the good old days of the 1960s when an enterprising US distributor could have bought this, chopped out everything but the effects and filmed some new material to slot in around it. Wondering what that could have been is about the most entertainment to be had from PROJECT GEMINI.

PROJECT GEMINI is out on digital from Ignition Films on Monday 28th March 2022