• Directed by “Gianni Mezzanotte” (Michael Heagle)
• Written by Matt Saari and Michael Haegle
• Starring
  • Leitha Matz
  • Heidi Fellner
  • Alan Struthers
  • Charles Hubbell
  • Snype Myers
• Produced by Michael Heagle, Tory A. LaFaye, and Matt Saari

The democratization of feature filmmaking has progressed beyond the wildest dreams of its earliest proponents in the ’80s and early 90’s. To accompany the development of digital video cameras, the software to manipulate the recorded imagery — or simply to create it wholesale independent of a lens — now allows ambitious do-it-yourselfers to compose footage that rivals or surpasses the best that Industrial Light and Magic could crank out in its heyday for summer blockbusters. Skill is still a major consideration, but the skill necessary now involves artistic sensibilities more than raw technical knowhow, and the means to do so no longer involves millions of dollars.

Planetfall acts as a showcase for the possibilities open to independent filmmakers. With an unpaid cast, free locations, a commercial digital video camera, and desktop FX software, director Michael Heagle (excuse me, “Gianni Mezzanotte”) has created a sci-fi extravaganza involving multiple spaceships, crash sites, futuristic vehicles, space stations, cyberpunk cities, and burnt-out post-apocalyptic ghost towns. Over four hundred FX shots (no, I didn’t count, I watched the behind-the-scenes footage) transform green-screened actors and a handful of well-chosen locations into a fully realized milieu. It’s rarely completely convincing, but it is certainly evocative and visually stimulating.

“That better be your gun.”

You’ll note that I’ve gone this far into the review without mentioning the story at all. Alas, as with so many independent productions, that facet of a movie which is least budget-dependent is least able to pull its own weight. Not content to give us a direct story well-told, Planetfall instead involves far too many characters and overlapping subplots which interfere with each other and leave the viewer wondering which storyline they’re supposed to care about and why.

In summary, it should be simple: Lux Antigone (Heidi Fellner) is a worldweary offworld bounty hunter, offered a lucrative job: To retrieve a sealed crate (the size of a shipping container) left behind after a transport crash on the wartorn planet Zita. It’s a little out of Lux’s normal line, but as is standard with bounty hunters in the movies, she’s in debt and needs the big payoff, so against her better judgment, she takes the job.

And now, to give you an idea of how simple ideas are overcomplicated throughout the movie, here’s the unnecessary backstory on Lux’s debt. She’s a Machinata, a member of a religious order widely regarded as a cult, which holds as a central tenet the idea of human-machine merger. Lux is behind on her onerous dues, and also under some suspicion as her chosen career isn’t entirely accepted by her religious superiors. All of this is explained to us in great detail throughout the movie, but none of it makes any difference. Whatever her religious ideals are, they’re never shown to have any bearing on her behavior; the tantalizing idea of the human-machine merger is never revisited after being mentioned once, nor is the idea of her semi-outsider status in her own faith. It’s a bushelful of backstory which serves no narrative purpose; better far simply to state that she has debts and leave it at that, rather than distract the audience with far too many details that prove to be utterly irrelevant. At first, viewers will try to pay attention to such details, under the mistaken belief that they will pay off later, but after too many such overdetailed backstories which show no sign of being worth the time taken to explicate them, eyes start to glaze and attention to wane. There’s simply too much being told to us that never matters.

“No valet parking?”

Rather than try to trace the story, then, I’ll simply enumerate the other characters and their attendant plot threads that compete for an ever-shrinking slice of the audience’s attention:

• Taking roughly as much screentime as Lux is Wendy (Leitha Matz) as another bounty hunter. But where Lux is Han Solo seen through the Matrix, Wendy tries to channel Clint Eastwood’s Man With No Name, right down to the squint and the half-smoked cheroot. Matz absorbed the entire Eastwood western catalog to prepare for the part, but there’s still only so much that imitation can accomplish. The mannerisms worked for Eastwood because he was also believably tough and seasoned; the same performance doesn’t have the same oomph when the performer is 5’4” and round-cheeked, and can barely handle her rifle. Her main shtick is to pal around with “Ugly” Hex (Alan Struthers), a lowlife wanted for many and varied crimes; when they run low on cash, she drags him in to the local authorities, collects the reward, then arranges his escape. She is also the errant daughter of…
• Arch Stanton, President of Zita. Stanton’s role is a confined cameo((A low-budget production technique by which a “name” performer works for a single day, performing scenes from a single location which take place throughout the narrative – or example, a police lieutenant who chews out the detective hero several times through the movie, or, as in this case, a president who talks to his operatives several times by videophone.)) by cult director Ted V. Mikels, and when he first walked on screen, I said, “Hey! Is that Ted Mikels?” Then I realized that I am now officially one of those people who can identify Ted Mikels at twenty paces. (In my defense, it was the boar’s tusk around his neck which was the clinching detail.) President Stanton is also very interested in getting his hands on the crashed crate, but he’s only just barely declared victory in a planetary civil war, and the territory in which the ship crashed is more under the influence of the unsurrendered rebels. His main underling is Fletcher (Elijah Drenner); he also communicates frequently with his army, in the person of…

Mikels is cool, yeah, but an Astro-Zombie cameo would have rawked!

• Sec Com Rusty Arnenson (Chaz Truog), who leads a small unit of the Zitan army. I think there maybe four guys under him. We first meet him when Wendy and Ugly pull their “collect the reward” shtick on him; after that, he and two soldiers are assigned to travel, on foot, into the Volcanic Zone to try to find the crate. I know the army’s just come out the other end of a planetary civil war, but there have got to be more resources to devote to this supposedly all-important retrieval than three pairs of boots.
• Shark Sterling (Snype Myers) is a big buff bounty hunter, the person who got Lux involved in the first place. The two of them have an on-again, off-again romantic thing going, and Shark connects Lux to General Corona (Renee Werbowski), who… Hell, I don’t know. She must be related to the civil war in some degree. Anyway, like everyone else, she wants the crate. Lux gives Shark the slip early on so she can keep the whole reward to herself; he tracks her down on the planet, then lets her go again, as a show of trust or something.
• Lux isn’t the only person Shark finds on the planet’s surface. In company with Fletcher, he travels into the CGI-realized demilitarized zone, and runs afoul of Jerik (Charles Hubbell), rebel leader who’s trying to out-Zod Terrence Stamp with his snarling and growling. Jerik is the leader of the Psyons, troops who gained psychic powers during the civil war thanks to the military’s use of Psylenol, which was also one of the things the war was fought over. Now Jerik and his men (well, “man” is all we see) want more Psylenol to maintain and increase their powers… and whaddaya know! Psylenol is what’s in the container crate! Now if only they can get the codes to open the otherwise impervious crate…

“Kneel before me, son of… whoever your dad was!”

• And there’s also psychic ranger Cumberland (Troy Antoine LeFaye), the only survivor of the first ship sent to retrieve the crate. Cumberland’s not Psylenol-dependent; he’s a hereditary telepath, according to various expository devices (though characters labeled “telepaths” are consistently shown to be telekinetics instead throughout the movie). He’s assigned to Arnenson’s unit on their foot journey into the Volcanic Zone for the crate, but there are soon suspicions that he’s actually working for the Psyons, for no motivation that’s ever suggested.

And there’s more – side tours to holy shrines, visions of the future that serve no function whatsoever, relationships and histories between characters that tangle everyone with more complexity than Jeff Foxworthy’s family tree. My first guess was that the screenplay had been adapted from a sprawling unpublished novel, with the novelist-cum-scriptwriter unwilling to jettison or combine any plot elements from the original. As it turns out, I had it almost exactly backwards; according to the making-of featurette, the movie started with some props and costumes, which inspired a simple script that unfortunately resulted, after initial production, in far less than an hour of usable footage. So characters, intrigues and subplots were added and added and added like successive layers of spackle until there was enough for a feature. Unfortunately, that kind of layered production resulted in the same end product as my first suspicion: A diluted narrative in which the original meat which inspired production is chopped and almost overpowered by the filler garnishes.

Oops, no one read the Psylenol label: “Store between 62 and 77 degrees.”

I know, I know, I’m negative and unpleasable. I’ve heard it plenty before, and I’d hear it a lot more if my mom didn’t hate calling long-distance. But I honestly don’t have an axe to grind against Michael Haegle and the rest of the cast and crew of Planetfall. They put a lot of effort into a no-budget effort, and managed to wring a lot of production value out of the meager resources they had. But in the midst of their backwards production process, they somehow lost sight of the absolute priority that story has in an feature film. It’s great to see filmmakers who encompass the duties and skills of production design, editing, and the various CG-based visual arts that still don’t have nailed-down titles. But in wearing all those hats, it’s too damned easy for those filmmakers to forget that they are primarily storytellers. It’s the one ball they can’t afford to drop.

Some Notable Totables:

• body count: 21
• breasts: 1
• male butts: 1
• explosions: 8
• dream sequences: 1
• ominous thunderstorms: 1
• actors who’ve appeared on Star Trek: 0