Laserhawk (1997)
The war began 250 million years ago...
I hadn’t planned on so many technical issues tonight, but if ever there was a silver lining it’s that it for once isn’t Spectrum’s fault as much as it is the power company not being able to keep a steady flow of juice flowing through their lines at the measliest inconvenience to one of the lines. Anyways, I’ve done a lot of newer movies lately, and I feel like that’s making me go soft (not really, I just felt like I should do an older movie). I’ve also done a bunch of horror lately because I’ve been getting away with it with a rash of solo watchings (or at least solo start watchings), so I though I’d give a little breath of fresh air to the non horror folks and combine my two targets: older, and not horror focused. What did I find? Space, bad CG, and Mark Hamill. No, not Wing Commander (although that would have been a good choice thinking about it) - a different one. Don’t confuse it with the awesome synth band, tonight we watch Laserhawk.
We follow the story of our lead character - a school kid getting close to graduating whose managed to stage a stellar UFO hoax video that does so well even the military shows up to ask him about it. Of course, his brief rise to coolness quickly crashes and burns, but at least he meets a new weird friend. Things take a bit of a turn though, as it turns aliens are in fact real, and have abducted an entire bus of school kids. It also turns out that there may or may not be some truth to a comic that has a ship that looks just like the one he built for his hoax. After his entire town is abducted, him and his new friend have to try and track down the truth in order to have any hope of saving their townsfolk - or even the world! It’s an alright story - perhaps nothing too shocking in the wide net of “geek kid becomes the hero of flying a spaceship” type movies - of which there is surprisingly many. It has a few twists or turns in there, but never really blowing you away in the current world.
The actors are okay. I won’t call them bad - although at times it can get pretty darn corny - but some of that isn’t gonna be on the actors. The thing is from ‘97, so a certain level of annoyance can be found with “goofy sidekick” roles, and it might not hold up with everyone. Some might find it, dare I say, annoying actually. That said, most the time I do feel like the actors are acting as intended, although there’s certainly a decent few times where folks in the scene acting with each other don’t really spark the best chemistry or exactly get you engrossed in what’s going on. Other times they do great, sometimes even hitting some jokes (which of course depends on the person watching which it is), but I would most assuredly not try to sell people to watch this for the acting on display. I’m not entirely sure if it’s nice or mean to say, but I’d call it at times to be downright dated. Mind you, I didn’t hate it, but I can watch SyFy originals and still not hate it so I’m probably not speaking for the mainstream there.
Characters are there, and it does do some stuff with them. I wouldn’t go as far as to feel like there is a lot of growth necessarily, but the story set up and pay offs do give the characters something more than just total stationary development levels I feel. Watching it currently, it does feel a bit off kilter at times, letting the watcher reminisce about a time when being a geek was actually a red flag that you were about as cool as a locker full of sweaty gym socks. On the other hand, it also strangely has a comic being this big huge hit and important thing, which seems a little in contrast to geeks still being uncool - but at the same time it makes sense given the movie is kind doing that geek-power main characters thing. A good number of the characters can be eccentric, for better or worse will depend on your tolerance to them. The bad guys? I mean, barely seen giant space spiders have the character development of we are their human equivalent to cows, and outside of that it doesn’t matter much. Considering I have a thing against spiders, I don’t really need any character for me to hope they get wiped out.
Diner club.
Alright, story is kinda so-so, the acting isn’t mostly the greatest even if it largely isn’t really bad-bad, and the characters all end up feeling eccentric or somewhat normal for a geek-to-hero story from the pre-2000s. I know, you probably already have some not great expectations for the costume and effects sections here - maybe even expecting me to say they are horrible or something. Well, let me say that time has not treated the effects of the movie well. There are some explosions that look good. There are a lot of spaceships that don’t look nearly as good. Now, I will admit that perhaps this probably DVD quality video was not meant to be watched on a fancy modern 4k projector. I’m willing to give some wiggle room that had I watched this thing in the SD 480p instead of it getting full-screened to 2160 (a difference of about 20 times the pixels) the space ships and other CG effects might not have looked nearly as bad. Heck, even the hard-coded fonts (such as the credits at the start of the movie) had some blur to them, so I already knew that it wasn’t going to be the most crisp and clean movie - but I also know for sure this didn’t seem like it was a Jurassic Park level of effects work going on, so even then I would expect it to feel aged. The very first space ship fight is kind of oof, but for most the movie it still kind of works in a goofy fashion at worst - until you hit the finale where you get the big space fight, and actually see the space spiders. At that point, it gets kind of major oof. Yes, I have seen far worse CG sharks from SyFy and Asylum - no, that doesn’t mean I won’t point out that this one isn’t great either.
Costumes fair a little better, but also that’s a bit cheating. See, most the movie is just normal attire, and yeah it looks like everyone is wearing believable enough outfits that it doesn’t take you out of it. The props also throughout the flick aren’t horrible - most the stuff again is pretty modern stuff, but even to the mock spaceship model the main character makes looks good enough. The only real fancy costume you get is the alien spaceship one, which has a bit of Gatchaman look in my opinion. It’s not bad, nothing too overly fancy either. It’s nothing really to write home about, but nothing really horrible here either. Sets get varied enough, and we even get the inside of the spaceship a few times as a practical set to boot.
Soundtrack might actually be one of the best departments here. Yes, that might be because it’s got some hard rock songs in there, and i like that genre so it’s not bad. Balance is fine, and you shouldn’t have a hard time hearing or understanding things. Subtitles also do a fine job of lining up. Sometimes there’s some cheesy-ness to the audio effects, but it didn’t really feel out of place considering the rest of the movie. For the thinking folks, it’s got pretty much what other movies of this type have to offer, except maybe with a twist on souls and memories, or perhaps some of the alien angles.
Time didn’t treat this space craft well.
This one is alright. I wouldn’t call it bad, but I know plenty of folks who probably would - that’s the nature of preference and me having watched probably over a thousand movies - the bigger the sample size, the more likely you are to have seen some real stinkers that put stuff into perspective. It had some fun moments, it had some fun ideas, but it also shows it’s age in the quality department especially when you try to throw it up on some 60+ inch 4k projector to muddy it up. It does have some slower moments that might feel a little bit drawn out at times, but it also really doesn’t feel like it’s wasting time all over the place outside of that super-long feeling opening credit set. It’d be interesting to see how it would fair with an up-rez, but if I were to be honest, I feel like some of it would be a Scorpion King scenario where making it cleaner won’t necessarily make it look better. Perhaps not my favorite kid turned pilot movie, and I musically would prefer the band of the same name that uses a z instead of an s - but it’s age and to me at worst mediocre parts aren’t enough to make me feel like I’ve wasted my time either.