Deus – The Dark Sphere, the review of the science fiction film on Prime Video

The Earth is on the brink of an environmental catastrophe, mainly due to the unstoppable increase in the world population, now equal to over 20 billion inhabitants: vast areas of the planet have become uninhabitable due to this out-of-control situation. One day, in the orbit of Mars, it is discovered a giant black sphere with mysterious origins and it is decided to send a spacecraft, made up of a crew of six people, to investigate.

As we tell you in the review of Deus – The dark sphere, the honor / burden falls to the spaceship Achilles, which has the task of investigating that unknown object. Upon waking up from a cryogenic sleep that lasted eight months, the crew members are ready for their delicate mission, on the outcome of which the fate of all humanity could depend. But as they approach the red planet, their ship is damaged by a singular ray of light emanating from the sphere, the preamble to a series of increasingly disturbing events which risk revealing a frightening truth.

In the heart of the abyss

This science fiction film flies the British flag and tries to re-propose the question in a blatantly genre key on the existence or otherwise of a God or of a supreme being, only to then fade into a more material twist than expected which reflects, albeit with a certain superficiality, on the potential drifts that our world is destined to encounter sooner or later. In a historical era where trips to Mars no longer seem like an unattainable mirage, it therefore appears that cliffhanger is anachronistic which seems to be an end in itself, perhaps in an attempt to impart a pinch of verve to a script that was curling up on itself, the result of stereotypes and derivative solutions to characterize what takes place on the claustrophobic spaceship.

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A world in shambles

The background to this near future and with post-apocalyptic contours is briefly carried out in an enigmatic voice-over by the protagonist, interpreted with the right effectiveness by the Australian Claudia Blacka true veteran of the sci-fi genre who we remember among others in the first, historical, Pitch Black (2000) and in television series Farscape And Stargate SG-1. The actress manages to give a bit of melodramatic verve to a character who is still a slave to the frenetic script, the only partially interesting one in an otherwise anonymous roster. From that sphere that recalls Michael Crichton’s classic, already transposed onto the big screen in Barry Levinson’s underrated adaptation, to existentialist echoes who would even like to look at such a pillar as Solaris (1972), the story inserts ideas here and there without an effective amalgamation and the interactions between the crew members themselves are affected by obvious forcing and improbability.

Between heaven and earth

The fact that the key figure of Karla has lost – as she introduced at the beginning of the vision – her mother and daughter in a dramatic accident opens the field to that debate on faith and on the desire to believe or not that that mysterious object floating in space is linked to divine conceptions or not, as the title already underlines Deus – The dark sphere. The low budget does not allow for exciting special effects, even if the management of the environments and the spaceship seen from the outside, although monothematic, is still discreet; the same cannot be said of the short part about that dark orb, between involuntarily tacky pseudo-visionary gasps and a general carelessness in the landscape outline. Perhaps with higher production values ​​and some smoothing in the script phase the project could have had its say in a crowded genre, between melodramatic cries and genre instincts, but on balance the result is modest and devoid of originality.