In space, no one can hear you yawn

I've been playing a video game called Dead Space, which is a more-or-less nonstop assault of terror and paranoia for hours on end. Twisted forms of re-purposed humans lurk, skitter, and burst forth from every corner which you slowly explore with intermittent access to light, oxygen, and gravity. So, since I'm a strange person who is entirely un-phased by media intended to induce fear, I looked for a movie that could maybe sustain that atmosphere and settled on Dark Space. Did I make a mistake? Yes, yes I did.

It's spring break...in space! Complete with a testoserone-fueled male stereotype (The Lunk) to make throwaway sexist comments to his friend (The Other Guy) about the female characters (The Slut, The Druggie, The Other Woman). The director's attempt to build character through comedy-based interactions falls completely flat, serving instead to quickly build my animosity toward actors who I was going to hate eventually. So, “thanks, movie!” for hastening my decision and freeing me to pay less attention to the prattle dripping from the characters' word holes.

The Lunk

After The Nerd (yes, he's on space vacation too, for some reason) is cajoled into monkeying with their rental spaceship(!), things go bad in a hurry. The group guilts him into saving them through a prolonged and wholly uninteresting “action” scene, ultimately delivering everyone to the surface of an unknown planet. Throughout the whole ordeal, nobody seems to care about the indescribable peril of being lost in space with no means of contacting anyone. This is where the movie could have done something meaningful, but instead it leaps right past the moment to instead present us with inanity.

The Druggie gets a compound leg fracture (somehow), which is healed by poking at it and wrapping it up. This is an important plot point (no, it's not) designed to keep her and The Nerd at the ship while the others meander around outside, slowly wandering toward a column of smoke. What could the smoke mean? We never find out, because WHO CARES? The movie flaunts its reckless abandonment of direction with a needless swimming scene in which we see The Lunk's ass.

The inevitable alien contact is entirely un-engaging, though it does show us that the aliens can run really fast except when they can't. It's convenient for the movie, but I think they could have explored this phenomenon in more depth. Are there other things the aliens are only sometimes good at? Like, would they be really excellent cake decorators until they got to the top of the cake, and then just give up? The director doesn't even take the time to show us the intricacies of the aliens' cake culture. Who knows what magnificent confections we are missing out on by not probing these possibilities? Here's a hint of the potential, based on a Google search for “alien cake”.

Instead of learning about alien cakes, our heroes(?) are saved(?) from a confrontation with an alien by a small army of rifle-weilding, heavily armored...things. It's not clear if they are robots, Power Rangers, other aliens, or maybe humans. Regardless of what they are, all their high technology does not help them shoot the alien or the dumb protagonists who spend what felt like an hour running through the woods.

Meanwhile The Nerd and The Druggie electrocute another alien who just wanted to poke around the ship. They also diagnose a leg infection that can be slowed by...tranquilizers? Sure, whatever. I was really hoping they were going to cut off her leg under the assumption that it was turning into alien flesh, but that's the exciting movie in my head, not this pathetic piece of refuse. At least the tranquilizers and leg infection is essential to the story (no, they aren't).

Everything crawls forward from here, revealing the troopers to be human Military Dudes out to exterminate the aliens so that they can do...something with the planet. Then a bunch of stuff happens: The Druggie peels off a man's charred face, The Other Guy dies and we are briefly made to feel sad, the aliens maybe show emotions or something(?), and The Other Woman beats a man to death with a rock, thus earning her friendship with the aliens. Somehow, the movie is not over, despite it having nothing left to do with itself. After a final, pointless scene, we get the sweet salvation of rolling credits.

I can't help but wonder why this is even called Dark Space. Yes, space is generally dark, but very little of the movie takes place in space, and the darkness of said space is never even remotely relevant. The video game that inspired me to watch this delivers on the most basic level: it takes place in space and there are lots of dead(ish) things. I'm not saying that the title is the biggest failing here, but if large swathes of the movie had been nothing more than a camera pointed at a dark corner, I don't think my opinion of it would be any lower.