Solar Crisis

Stars: Tim Matheson (Drop Dead Fred, Stephen King's Sometimes They Come Back), Charlton Heston (Planet of the Apes, The Ten Commandments), Peter Boyle (Honeymoon in Vegas, Outland), Jack Palance (City Slickers, one-armed push-up star of 1992 Oscar ceremonies), Annabel Schofield, Corin Nemec. One of the constant problems with science fiction films is that they seem to be made by people whose emotions stopped developing at the age of 12, even though their minds continued to grow. Solar Crisis, a space epic made for a reputed $35 million dollars, is no exception. The plot, once you strip away all the technical gibberish, is fairly straightforward: in the year 2050, the sun is preparing to hawk a major solar loogie in Earth's direction (thereby instantly turning it into toast), unless the spaceship Helios and it's kamikaze smart robot can be launched in time to trigger the flare when that section of the sun is turned away from the Earth. Charlton Heston, Tim Matheson, and Corin Nemec play three generations of astro-numbnuts who always wear constipated looks on their faces and speak in grandiose tones about imminent this, that, and the other. The monkey wrench in the ointment here comes in the form of Annabel Schofield, a brilliant scientist who gets her brain re-routed right after the requisite shower scene (why is that only women take showers in space?). Annabel spends the rest of the film walking around in a cold sweat, mumbling with her eyes crossed (which should have been a tip-off to the rest of the crew, but of course isn't). Solar Crisis does have a lot of nifty-looking special-effects scenes, but it also has a lot of truly lame lines of dialogue (my favorite is this one about the sun: "it's timeless, it's ageless, maybe it's even eternal," an observation that gives new meaning to the word "redundant.") Audience: Trekkies and techno-twits.