A transport ship with a tiny crew and few passengers crashlands on a planet with three suns. (The solutions to the three-body problem in classical mechanics generally involve one of the bodies rapidly zipping off to nowhere, which is why no one has seen a trinary star system in real life.) Due to the excess sunlight, there's no night on this planet. Usually. But every 22 years there's a total eclipse where the planet hides behind a larger, ringed planet and it becomes completely dark. The cinematography of the eclipse with the ringed planet dominating the sky is just amazing.
Vin Diesel gives an excellent performance as an escaped convict who, as one of the survivors, is forced to help everyone find a way off the planet. Cole Hauser and Claudia Black play the crewmen, and then the rest of the passengers are all wackos, who of course end up getting picked off one by one by spooky creatures that come out when it's dark. Overall this is one of the better sci-fi films I've seen in quite some time, but that's not saying a lot, as many sci-fi films lately have sucked. |