Millennium Crisis (2007)
[+]
(Foreign Titles)
Nomination Year: 2014
SYNOPSIS: The first IMDB review I saw of this movie said, "Don't believe the average star rating, I suspect it's artificially high from people involved in the project rating it highly." Given that its star rating was 2.8/10, I thought this was sarcasm. It's not. In the past, we've described movies as "like a porn movie with all the sex edited out." Millennium Crisis is a bunch of cut scenes in search of a video game.
In the future, menial worker Aurora gets fired after accidentally making fun of her boss while trying to hit on a sexy space marine commander (although she does get a date out of the deal). The next day, she's offered a job on another planet by a quasi-lesbian android, who hits on her enough to creep her our, but not enough to keep her from taking the job.
The lezbot accompanies Aurora on the ship to the new planet and immediately goes into shutdown mode for the trip, leaving Aurora completely alone on the ship. Bored, she wanders around and finds a bunch more androids, who she accidentally wakes up. These androids turn out to be Terran Special Forces androids, who have accidentally become self-aware. Unfortunately, they are accompanied by a Nosferatu-Class Neuronecromotron who is assigned to kill everyone in sight if they try to escape -- and it interprets their waking up as an escape attempt. Cue Special Forces and Neuronecromatron stalking each other around the ship in Alienesque fashion for a few minutes, ending when the lesbot wakes up and stakes the Nosferatu with her tail. Really.
Meanwhile, some random guy we've never seen before gets into a sword fight with a topless female assassin droid, who we've also never seen before, because the filmmakers knew I was short on Let's Up the Rating to 'R' clips this year. Thanks, filmmakers!
Arriving on the new planet, Aurora finds out her new employer is the space marine officer she had the date with earlier. Unfortunately, he's really a Kluduthu, who are unkillable race of space vampires who feed on the blood of other races. He wants to start a war, because all the fighting will make it easier for the Kluduthu to find victims. To do that, he wants to kill the Terran ambassador on some space station somewhere, but he has to get past the ambassador's security. But he's discovered that, unbeknownst even to her, Aurora is the last of a mythical race of shapeshifters -- and, by "shapeshift," we mean she can change her DNA to mimic any race, without actually changing her physical appearance at all, since they can't afford shapeshifting special effects. Lezbot turns Aurora into a Kluduthu, so she's forced to obey the commands of the other Kluduthu.
They travel to the space station, where Aurora declines to kill the ambassador and flees in a shuttle, which crash lands on a desert world. She is promptly rescued by Ted Raimi (Joxer from Xena: Warrior Princess), who appears to be in this movie only to prove it's not too low-budget to be Smithee-eligible. Thanks, Joxer!
Aurora discovers she isn't actually a Kluduthu, either because lezbot only faked turning her or because she's immune. She then leaves Joxer to go find a better movie to be in and meets up with the Kluduthu leader again. He says that Kluduthu can only be killed by members of one specific alien race, and the last member of that race is the one who was killed in the topless sword fight. Aurora DNA-shifts into a member of that race and kills him and we get to stop watching this movie. Thanks, movie!
There are two important details about this movie that I have yet to mention. First, each planet and ship -- and there are a lot -- is designated by a different, hyper-annoying lighting effect. Second, there is no zooming in this movie. Every time a normal human being would zoom the camera in or out, director Andrew Bellware uses a jump-cut instead. He doesn't *quite* substitute a jump-cut for every pan, but he manages to avoid most of them, too. I have never wanted to kick a director in the balls as much as I wanted to kick Andrew Bellware in the balls after watching this movie.
Greg Pearson
Steve Deighan
