Solar Crisis

1990/USA/112 minutes

A turgid sci-fi melodrama, Solar Crisis or Starfire is a dreary oddball entry into the legions of space travel movies made after Alien in 1979. This time, a mission of 16 people is on a race to save earth from the malice of sun which is threatening to annihilate our planet with a massive solar flare. So the brave men and women go aboard the good spacecraft Helios with the plan to drop an anti-matter sentient bomb called Freddy on the sun, so that the solar flare can be diverted from earth to torch another planet instead.

What we basically get is cast members standing around and throwing a lot of scientific jargon at each other; every time the engine leaks or something catches fire, they shout ' I want a damage report right now !'

To top it all, there are parallel stories about a greedy billionaire called Teague who doesn't believe evidence of the solar flare, and wants to milk people's money in the ensuing panic caused by Armageddon theories. How he plans to profit is left unclear, but maybe he'll be selling sunglasses, air conditioners or sunscreen lotions, or maybe he'll be buying the minerals and other scarce resources cheap. Also, how he will enjoy the profits when he dies along with earth is not clear. Anyhow, he sends an albino henchman to sabotage the Helios mission. The henchman accomplishes his task by reprogramming a 'biogenetically enhanced' female called Alex Noffe who is a crew member of Helios. So the filmmakers want us to believe that the stooge somehow managed to sneak aboard the high security spaceship and reprogram the half android, instead of like doing the task himself.

As a second parallel sub-plot, the mission captain Kelso is at loggerhead with his father who is an admiral, over the son of the former. The senior Kelso gets down to earth looking for his grandson, whereas the latter has run away from military school to be with his father. The paths of the two cross and basically the plot element is neither here nor there, just plain annoying diversion. 

The ending is equally ambiguous, because Alex is seen steering the Ra spaceship with an evil smile (with the talking Freddy in tow) towards the sun with the bright rays inundating her face, and then Boom ! The simulated solar flare model disappears from the radar of Helios and captain Kelso says 'Take us home'. I wonder if that was the entire point of the movie, let the audience be at peace at home, instead of boring them with this incoherent mess. With a running time of 112 minutes, the film seems interminable and extremely boring. It's not even cheesy and fun enough to be 'so bad that it's good' type. With a strange B movie feel to its execution and photography, it is surprising to note that this was made with a budget of 44 million USD. But it seems to have made no mark and has disappeared without a trace since its release in 1990. All for a good reason  !