Alien Planet

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Starring: J. Craig Venter
Rated: Unrated
Type: DVD
Directed By: Pierre de Lespinois
Studio: Sony Pictures
Release Date: 2005-08-16
The dynamic meeting of solid science and futuristic simulation culminates in a dramatic exploration to another inhabited planet seven light years away. Alien Planet creates a realistic depiction of creatures on another world, where life is possible, if not provable, according to scientists' theories. Take this fascinating journey created by state-of-the-art animation and photo-realistic affects, leading NASA and Jet Propulsion Laboratory experts and, of course, imagination.

Uhm... No
This could have been an entertaining and educational production. It definitely has its moments: the story of how a spacecraft could reach an alien planet, explore it, and get the information back to Earth is very well done and sports computer animations that would put television Sci-Fi movies like Battlestar Galactica to shame. Suggestions on how diverse alien life forms could turn out to be will leave you thinking long after the movie is over. Somewhere along the way though, it all falls completely apart, as if the original writers went on vacation and let the kids from the local kindergarten write the last 30 minutes of the show. The 200-foot tall Gumby-like Strider creature walking on the Jello ocean will have you laughing until your sides hurt -- until you realize the writers are serious. And it goes downhill from there. If you can find this DVD used for a couple bucks, it's worth it. $15 or more, buy a SETI book, read it, and bang it against your head a few times -- all more educational and enjoyable than this movie.

Interesting but not without some issues
First off let me get some of the issues out of the way.

1) This movie is listed as widescreen with a 1:78:1 ratio and even the dvd case lists that but I have found this not to be true. On my HD widescreen tv the movie only looks correct when I set the tv screen mode to 4:3. I do have black bars on both top and bottom and on both sides of the picture but the movie image looks correct and is not stretched or distorted in any way. If I set my TV to 16:9 or Just Scan (which is the best setting for widesceen movies on my TV) the picture gets stretched and distorted and I still have black bars above and below the picture. Did anybody else have this issue?

UPDATE: This movie is 1:78:1 but is NOT ANAMORPHIC, hence the black bars that are still present on widescreen tv's

2) As another reviewer pointed out already, there is definetly some missing scenes. I distinctly remember watching this movie on the discovery channel and seeing a scene in a swamp. The swamp had Giant Mushroom like plants and in the sky was a creature called a Sky Whale. The Sky Whale eventually was swarmed upon by flying insect like creatures. It was a very cool scene and is sadly missing from this DVD. It makes me wonder how many other scenes were deleted or omitted that no one has noticed. I also wonder if there is another version of this movie.

UPDATE: I have discovered that the missing scenes I and another reviewer mentioned are not missing at all. They are actually in an another but similar movie called Alien Worlds

As for the movie itself, I found it to be quite interesting. The concept is reasonable. Human created robots are sent to another planet about 65 light years away in search of alien life forms. 2 robots survive the landing initially and are programmed to study any life forms they encounter. One robot is programmed to take more risks and study animal like life forms and the other is programmed to be more conservative and study more non threatening basic and plant life forms. So far so good. As soon as alien life forms are encountered you can't help but feel that the creatures were designed too similar to earthly creatures. The alien trees look too similar to earthly trees. The sapsucker creature is similar to earth's flying squirrels. The creature that kills and eats the sapsucker looks like a giant bat, the land roaming creatures look like dinosaurs and so on. There are a few really cool creatures however, especially the hovering ones at the end of the movie that don't take a liking to the robots, I won't give it completely away :-) But most of the creatures encountered don't seem too alien enough for my liking and there aren't enough of them. I have seen deep sea creatures on earth that look more alien then some of the ones shown in this movie.

The bottom line is that the movie was entertaining enough, has some neat interviews with scientists and other notable people. The picture and sound quality is very good (minus the aspect ratio mentioned above). I was a little disappointed in the designs of the alien life forms but other viewers may not be. I did get some enjoyment from watching this movie and it is cheap enough (about $12) I guess all I really wanted was to get my moneys worth of entertainment and I did.

Alien Planet
It was very boring, and more about the fictional machines that were exploring a planet than what could on other planets. Plus it was very slow moving and silly.

enjoyable, great "alien" point of views!
I love sci-fi - watching it, reading it and writing it. I would highly recommend this work because of the alien creatures that were developed for it. Although it does drag with redundant footage it's bearable (That was only because it had aired with commercials. They attempted to keep you at suspense with the next alien creature coming up).
I had noticed that they had removed one part of the show for the disk. It was an encounter with a "sky whale". It was great scene. It showed the sky wales in the air until one of them flew too low and was attacked by a hundred small insects. It was actually my favorite creature in it.
Does anyone know why it was removed?
Anyway, the work is good.
-Bruce P. Squirrel

Buy "Expedition" instead
I love Wayne Barlowe's book "Expedition", which this video is based on, and I really don't think the video does it justice for a number of reasons.

As weird as it sounds, what really gets under my skin is that the people presenting this information on the video are scientists, but they're scientists presenting made-up creatures as though we'd actually found them on another planet already. I love science and I love art and I love the way Wayne Barlowe presented his book through a sci-fi lens, but I feel like the real scientists here sold out. Scientists, even when "at play" as they are here, should be held to a higher standard. They should not be taking the director's instructions in order to make it sound like this is a discovery that's already been made. Modern people have enough trouble understanding that science is a process and not some sort of magic or religion.

Anal retentive.. maybe. But even putting that aside, the book still gives you a better look and a better understanding of Barlowe's masterpiece.