Video Review

Moon 44 (1991)

MPAA Rating: R
Reviewed by Ty Burr | Jan 25, 1991
EW's GRADE
D+

Details Movie Rated: R; Genres: Action/Adventure, Sci-fi and Fantasy; With: Dylan McDermott, Michael Pare and Stacy Travis; Distributor: LIVE Video

p> Directors Ridley Scott and James Cameron have got to be the twin godheads of recent sci-fi B flicks. Without the former's Alien and Blade Runner and the latter's Aliens and The Terminator, all those cheapies larding the video store shelves wouldn't have punk-industrial sets, ravenous space beasties, traitorous cyborgs, or a thick air of hip paranoia. Instead, they'd be Star Wars knockoffs.

Even less impressive is director Roland Emmerich's Moon 44, which boils down Aliens' Marines-in-space plot to a lumpy mass. True, it has a cast that fans of trashy action movies have come to love and respect: cute and wooden Michael Pare, huge and drooling Dean Devlin, woozy psycho Stephen Geoffreys, and Malcolm McDowell. The story, too, has the nasty potential of a high-school brawl in the way it pits hardened convicts against teenage computer geeks on a distant mining moon. The special effects are awfully dinky, though, and if the script sounds poorly translated from the German, that's because it is. D+

Originally posted Jan 25, 1991 Published in issue #50 Jan 25, 1991 Order article reprints