Strange Planet (1999)

Originally Reviewed

Saturday February 25, 2006

Every once in a while I take a risk and watch one of my favorite actor's/actress’s earlier films, for the lone reason that they are in it, more often than not this decision circles around and swiftly kicks me in the rear, a majority of the time their earlier films are unheard of for a reason. Naomi Watts in Strange Planet is no exception. The only strange thing about this film is where the writers seemed to have gotten the idea for it in the first place. 

The film follows two separate groups of friends who live in Sidney, Australia. All of them have one thing in common, they don't have anyone who loves them. So from the beginning of the film, (which is also the beginning of the new year) until the end, (which is the end of that year), these six people screw their lives up looking for someone to love them, and in the end SURPRISE find each other! The predictability of the film is obvious, especially when the group of guys end up sporadically running into the girl’s storyline by pure fate. Once you realize a pairing between the girls group and the guys group is going to happen it’s pretty easy to figure out who will end up with whom simply because their personalities and past experiences are almost identical.

Now on to the strange part, they kept trying to focus on an episode of the Twilight Zone where some astronauts land on a "strange planet", all go insane, kill each other, and then the lone survivor discovers that they hadn't crashed on another planet but back on Earth.   Now the point of this to the film confuses me, and to the best of my ability the only way I can find a correlation is to the fact that the two groups feel isolated and believe there is no one out there for them. When in the end there ends up being three people who where not far away. I love the Twilight Zone but that whole correlation didn't work very well in my opinon.

Strange Planet ends up getting old fast, even an hour and thirty minutes was too long. The acting was sub-par, even Naomi Watts lines were horrible. Another familiar face is Hugo Weaving from Lord of the Rings and The Matrix, this is the first times I have actually seen him play a rather normal character with emotions. In the end, the film has a few comedic points, mainly being those with the character of Neil who can't even get the nerves to talk to women but constantly spits out facts about them he has read in Cosmo, which is hilarious; but for the most part the film falls too short of a decent TV movie that big fans of Naomi Watts wouldn't even find very entertaining.

3/10