legion

I rented this movie expecting it to be dreadful (which is a good state of mind to be in when watching anything made in the last few years) , but deciding that there would be some novelty value in watching Corey Feldman try and tackle a serious role. Legion is basically The Dirty Dozen meets every 'uncooperative team in the future meets alien presence in a claustrophobic environment' movie you've ever seen.

Sometime in the future , the world is at war yet again. The U.S. army enlists a ragtag group of badass prisoners ( with the exception of Corey Feldman who's a geeky computer hacker prisoner) with death sentences to go on a suicidal mission in return for a pardon. They have to capture a heavily guarded fuel station on another planet to aid the war effort.

Leading this highly cliche bunch of cons is Major Agatha Doyle. She isn't a prisoner , but is on probation for getting half her platoon killed due to a mix-up in communications. She's a lot more attractive than most Majors you see in movies ( though most Majors in movies are crusty old Richard Crenna types , so it goes without saying) , and this doesn't go unnoticed by Peter Weller lookalike Aldrich , who is a semi-love interest for her in the movie in a Mulder & Scully kind of platonic way.

When they arrive at the fuel station , it's totally deserted except for a bunch of stiffs in U.S. uniforms , and the maggots that now inhabit their rotting corpses. This left me wondering how flies can survive on a planet devoid of oxygen , but maybe I was looking too deeply into things. It soon becomes apparent that a deadly alien creature has taken over the compound , and of course it begins picking off these ex-death row inmates faster than old sparky.

This was pretty much the same as every other Aliens / The Thing rip-off. The cover of the video even said 'watch it if you enjoyed Aliens and The Thing'. Feldman was pretty dissapointing as Segal the Computer hacker. Mainly because he was a little too competent as an actor. I had been hoping he'd overact like an idiot. The scene where the inmates were introduced to Major Doyle was pretty amusing. They threw in every outlandish criminal personality they could , including a woman given the death sentence for killing two guys that raped her, a space pilot that wen't awol with a ship to visit his girlfriend ( like Bo Svenson in Inglorious Bastards) , and a religious fanatic (Gretchen Palmer- Free Enterprise)who takes orders from the Angel of Death.

Although I wasn't expecting a lot , this still wasn't much good. It wasn't at all suspenseful or claustrophobic , and I didn't really care who lived or died because the characterisations were minimal , and they were pretty much all the dregs of society and deserved what they got anyway. You really have to have all of these factors to make this kind of movie interesting , and on top of all that the ending was very anticlimactic. Another problem was that this movie tried to be too serious as well , and by the look of the monster at the end they should obeyed one of the cardinal rules of filmmaking : If your monster looks that unconvincing , whatever you do , don't let the audience get a good look at it. Still , I suppose it's leaps and bounds ahead of Mission To Mars if you're looking for a sci-fi time killer. That's if you have the patience to sit it out 'till the end.