Moon 44 (1990)

Plot so thin, it passes unnoticed.

Not even bad in a good way

Memorable, crazy movie

Clever, believable, and super fun to watch. It totally has replay value.

I don't know why people who write reviews on this movie, are so grumpy!This movie was made in 1990, it says it has action, it has action, also it says it's a thriller, it keeps the viewers attention and it's sci-fi, thinking it has a low budget, you should expecting to see an Iron Man 3 sci-fi, it has little special effects but it compensates with the talent of the actors that you don't find in our days.I personally like this movie and I appreciated it, because it's an old one and a good one.I really don't regret that I've seen it, I'm glad, Michael Paré is a good actor and his role attitude is fantastic.I scored it a little higher 8 out of 10 i think is around 7.7 out of 10.

Most of the reviews of this movie came around the time it made its debut. Now it's a dozen years later... and this piece of trash sure hasn't aged well.But even if this were opening day, this absolutely abysmal movie would still rank as one of the worst in history.It starts out with some of the worst acting I've ever seen, people sitting around a conference table at a major corporation. I swear it looks like the director or producer just decided to cut costs and have his friends and family fill in for real actors. One can really appreciate good acting when one sees the complete opposite.The worst, most ill-conceived character is the Sergeant aboard the space ship. His dialogue is contradictory nonsense. I couldn't believe my ears. It was stupefying. Maybe standards for movie making were more lax back then, but his was incomprehensible.All the characters are cartoonish, the acting is horrendous, and the amateurish "plot" is just an embarrassment to anyone who loves good movies. This one insults our intelligence at every turn.As you probably know, this movie is about the (grim) future when we need to exploit space for raw materials. One massive company is losing all their moon mining operations to pirates. Their cargo shuttles, full of raw materials, go missing. Therefore, they need to find out what's going on, or the company will lose everything.That could be an interesting premise for a movie, but not the way it was done here. Every lame cliché was put to dutiful use, every cookie cutter character was used. Nothing worthy of our time or attention. This was paint by numbers, and sloppily done.This is by no means some elitist review. I love movies of all sort. I wasn't looking for some intellectual "art house" film. This review is negative because the entire film, from start to finish, is just a horrid waste of our time.

It's never a good sign when the DVD costs just £1 and comes in one of those very thin cases. Neither is it when there's just the bald title printed on the disc and there's no additional material. Still; we live in hope...Well; what you see is what you get. Don't be fooled by Roland Emerich's name amongst the credits; this is truly a C-movie.The plot goes something like this. Uninhabited worlds in deep space are being mined for minerals. The stuff is then taken away in shuttle-craft to planetary processing plants. This makes the shuttles extremely valuable and somebody is hijacking them. An undercover cop is sent to find out what's going on, by joining a prison-team at the next world most likely to be targeted. That's 'Moon 44'.Like so many of these cheap (and not so cheap) movies, money seems to have been saved by not employing a lighting facility. And everything happens in an often barely discernible gloom - even indoors. The twilight never lifts from the beginning to end, making for an extremely dull and claustrophobic experience. Actors are almost all B or C-list and they are doomed to struggle with a script that might be politely described as lacking intelligence. Even the 'big catch' of an ageing Malcolm Macdowell from 'A Clockwork Orange' fame, fails to illuminate either the set or the script.There's so many silly things going on as regards the plot that it sometimes appears as if children had drafted it. Macdowell's the boss/baddie on the moon, but we never know who he's working for. It's clearly not himself as there's a big battle-cruiser turns up to launch an attack on the moon. Where from? Who's in it? Where does it go? Who cares - clearly not Mr Emmerich. Criminals are sent as defence pilots. They fly helicopters along smoke-filled canyons. Why? why not gain altitude and be a helluva lot safer? Weapons systems are actually more primitive than those available today. Apaches (attack helicopters) employ 8 'Hellfire' guided missiles with a range of up to 5 miles. These defenders didn't engage the enemy within 1000 yards.On top of all this, there's a testosterone-sodden bi-line about these violent scum-of-the-earth criminals (who are yet still exceptional enough to be qualified helicopter pilots) that makes 'Shawshank' seem like a holiday-camp. This is needlessly emphasised by a shower-scene rape. Ironically, the rapist chooses to rape his land-based navigator, the one man upon whom he will have to depend in the foggy valleys, and it never occurs to him that this geezer might take revenge. Yes.Bought as a piece of cheap Friday-night throwaway hokum, it was in the charity shop by Saturday afternoon.

There is no reason on earth to watch this testosterone driven pile of pseudo homo-erotic horse cookies masquerading as an SF movie. The story could have been written on the back of a postage stamp (but is credited to have taken FOUR people to concoct). The visuals are totally derivative; take Alien, Outland, bits of Blade Runner, shove through blender. The acting is abysmal. Not even McDowell can summon up the effort to be interested in his lines and he can usually be counted on to have some fun with his roles.If you do watch this movie after reading the trashing it gets on the IMDb there are some rewards to be got from it. It's one of those movies that lets you sit there and ask yourself questions like: What are the teenage whizz kid navigators actually FOR? All they do is say "Go faster!" or "Go up!" I mean if the muscle-bound ex-prisoner fighter pilots can't work out that crashing into canyon walls in a speeding helicopter is not a good idea then they are even thicker than they look (and boy do they look thick - physically as well as mentally. Where did these guys learn to fly? - The Charles Atlas Fight School of dynamic tension?).As it turns out, these guys ARE as thick as two short planks because, having been told that their lives are in the hands of their teenage navigators they seem to think it's a good idea to anally rape one of them in the shower. Not clever.Other questions you might like to ask yourself include why ALL the doors in this movie give off huge spurts of steam every time they open, or close. In fact, why does _everything_ in this movie give off great spurts of steam? Everywhere people go on the mining station steam shoots out at them from walls, doors, ceilings, and floor - even, unbelievably, the cockpit of a shuttle craft. They have steam lines in the cockpits of shuttle craft? Steam powered spaceships? Wow! Welcome to the future! In fact the only place where there is no steam to be seen is in the kitchens, the only place you would EXPECT to see it. It's that kind of dumb stupid movie. There must have been at least 3 guys on set whose only job was to fire off fire extinguishers at random - and stoke the smoke machine. There is an awful lot of smoke in this movie.It also has that standard shot of space ship approaching planet. You know the one. Static peaceful planet swimming in space. Suddenly there is ominous music and from the side of the frame comes a metallic something which just keeps on going and going, getting bigger and bigger, a vast 3 mile long pile of plastic glued together to look like a spaceship, on and on it comes until the glowing bits at the back finally come into shot with a sound cue of jet enginey noises. Finally with this movie I worked out what has always bugged me about that shot. If the engines are blasting away like that it means the the ship is accelerating towards the planet. Surely anything having crossed interstellar space would be DEcelerating as it approached its destination. Standard operating procedure for that would mean that the ship should be approaching the planet arse first with its engines going - unless they were blasting out Suckions an as yet undiscovered form of anti-acceleratonic particle. Christ I was bored.If for nothing else I will be grateful for this movie for being so vacant of anything worth watching or caring about that it gave me time to think that one out.Worst Line: "I got fed up with talking to my French fries."