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Space Marines
Shiver me timbers, it be our old enemy, the Space Marines!
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Space Marines
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Rated PG
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Starring Billy Wirth, Cady Huffman, John Pyper-Ferguson
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Approx: 90 minutes
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Review by Tamara I. Hladik
 deep-space freighter with a belly full of mysterious cargo is ambushed and boarded somewhere beyond the bounds of civilization. The pirates take the cargo and its guardian, a high-level diplomat, and scuttle back into the recesses of the desolate sector. Space marines, on alert and mission-ready, receive a call to action -- rescue the hostage and retrieve the cargo, a stockpile of nuclear explosives large enough to bring the universe to its knees.
This crew does what marines do best. The gruff sergeant, the hot pilot, and the heroic grunts storm the pirate stronghold, but on the brink of efficient, ass-kicking success they are pulled out. Lofty bureaucratic committees prefer a diplomatic solution to the hostage situation and have agreed to meet the ransom demands of the pirate leader, the mustachioed, speechifying villain, Colonel Fraser. Uneasy and smelling a trap, the marines must merely baby-sit the exchange, for the hand-off is to be carried out by a high-ranking ambassador and his attaches.
Things, predictably, go terribly wrong. The ambassador and his aides are taken prisoner and the original hostage is blown up. But the marines are not entirely trumped. One of their own, Zack Delano (Wirth), is undercover, posing as an attache. Zack's one of the heroic grunts from the aborted mission, and he's not backing down this time. With single-minded and single-handed determination he frees himself and the ambassador's aide and reconnoiters with his buddies, who have taken matters back into their own hands. But the mission is not over yet. The ambassador, now surgically implanted with nuclear explosives, is still in the clutches of Colonel Fraser, who plans to pay a visit to the ruling Planetary Council.
Where's the parrot at?
Space Marines is a notch above basement-budget. It spent some good money on computer animation, and while this is no screen epic, some interest has been taken in this production. However, don't be fooled. Because the film is uninspired and a rehash of threadbare stereotypes, everything in it is rendered gratuitous -- the violence, the writing, the acting. The familiar hit parade? A frustrated commander who chafes under nonsensical orders; the annoying, mouthy female with a little power; a military hero with enlisted stripes on his shoulder but commander mettle in his soul.
The film is a mixed bag, and is enjoyable if viewers are expecting little. However, for those looking for more, watching Space Marines is like sitting on a long bus ride wearing wet socks. That being said, there are many good points: The film has a quick pace, it's roughly logical, and the actors do a decent job. There are even some fun aspects. The pirate theme gives the film a bit of continuity, and when touched upon, it yields some goofy humor. Colonel Fraser, the pirate lord, has a sort of steely peg leg, and his assistant (a Snake Plisskin knockoff) looks enough like a pirate rogue that one yearns to ask, "Where's yer parrot at, matey?"
So, Space Marines is best of its class, but that's about equal to winning a beauty contest in Mos Eisley.
As the movie opened, I sat dispiritedly through the opening credits until Meg Foster's name appeared (she was the marine commander). This pale-eyed talent is usually enjoyable to watch, whatever the production. -- Tamara
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Crime Traveller
Partners in time fight partners in crime
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Crime Traveller
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Starring Michael French, Chloe Annett
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BBC1
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Saturdays, 8:10
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Review by John Gosling
 ime travel is surely what science fiction was invented for, but for the writer it is also the most difficult genre to fashion convincingly, mainly because time itself conspires to unravel plots. Just how elastic is time? What would happen if you stepped back a century and murdered your grandparents? Could you use a time machine to win big at the races? The questions are endless, as are the possible answers, but no matter how tightly the writer has tied up the laws of cause and effect, there is always going to be someone who will pick apart the gordian knot and point out the paradox that invalidates the story. Of course some writers can make the knot trickier to undo than others.
And so to Crime Traveller, a new eight-part BBC series that adds a new wrinkle to the detective story genre by allowing two sleuths to investigate crimes before they have happened. Jeff Slade (French) is a no-nonsense police detective that British television viewers will instantly recognize as the embodiment of several past tough-guy coppers. His partner in time is Holly Turner (Annett), a character equally out of the past, in that she is the beautiful daughter of a mad scientist, though since this is the 1990s she gets to have a brain (and she's inherited her father's secret time travel project).
The time machine itself is a gloriously retro jumble of electronic components cluttering Holly's apartment, though the time travel effect itself is limited to a modest light show.
The first time is always the hardest
In the first episode, Slade stumbles onto Holly's secret and the two form a reluctant partnership. There are however limits to their travels, as the machine will only send them back a random number of hours into the past. Furthermore, they must return to the machine at the end of their allotted time, or be caught forever in a "loop of infinity," in which, incidentally, Holly's father is trapped.
This brings viewers back to the comments about the difficulties of writing time travel stories. Writer and series creator Anthony Horowitz is obviously enjoying adding a new dimension to the detective genre, but temporally aware viewers will be left squirming at some obvious flaws in logic and rather uninspired technical terms like "loop of infinity."
Annet turns in a highly personable performance, though Slade could almost be a parody, so completely over the top is his portrayal of the maverick cop character. However, his performance to date lacks the necessary touch of self-deprecation to make it work entirely comfortably as parody. He doesn't so much throw away the book as tear out the pages one by one and eat them, and though he may have the obligatory despairing boss, she has so far ignored his most glaring (and rather violent) indiscretions. Meanwhile, poor Holly looks on in despair at his unorthodox methods and tries to remind the bull-headed Slade that the laws of time are unforgiving.
Crime Traveller may not be great SF or even particularly brilliant police drama, but it does occupy a potentially fascinating middle ground, and if the characters are given room to grow and the time travel plots strengthened, this series could have a long future. -- John
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