The movie was interesting. Firstly, we have a remake of Hitchcock’s tense thriller “Lifeboat”, and secondly, it was shot by Ron Silver – an actor who copes with roles quite well. This is his director's pen test, and the only one left. However, the debut was quite decent, because the author with knowledge seized the nerve of the first story, managing to play his own play with him, rejecting the time-lapse reshoot of former material. To compare the classic and the current remake, joyfully, difficult.
Only the most general plot about a group of survivors who have to undergo the most difficult tests in a limited area, where in addition to the acute shortage of provisions with water there is a hidden pest that helps to be eliminated from the game by comrades in misfortune. The endless horizon of water with a drifting boat was replaced by a dead space with a metal rescue shuttle, and a selected German sailor was discharged. This secret is left by intrigue, allowing the viewer to enjoy playing detective until the most revealing climax, getting through the jungles of false motives in each. The secret “wormhole” in the team, hatching insidious plans, of course, is another decoration of the main problem, but this is only an additional motor to the general situation, forcing with great interest to monitor the behavior of the characters in constantly deteriorating conditions. Ruthless space and a metal tiny vial with wires, lost in it, is an excellent help for an entertaining claustrophobic thriller, where dangers are a heap with radiation, meteorites, temperature changes, air reduction and much more. Therefore, despite the modest television format of the production, the actor-director confidently keeps the necessary rhythm of intense incidents, then leaning towards a psychological thriller with raised questions about the necessary sacrifices of the weak for the survival of the strong, then playing a disaster film, then resorting to drama. I repeat, for restrained means it is very commendable that small special effects only to limit the important framework of the plot about survival, filled with complex questions and emotions of people, and not vice versa, to grasp the immense with the visual attraction of space fiction. Honestly, all futurism is only a condition that aggravates the state of affairs, and the filling itself, where hostages of a lifeboat operate, is interesting.
In general, if you try to find flaws in the film, then perhaps some viewers will not have something particularly vile in demonstrating human nature, as is often the case in productions of similar subjects, where the authors shamelessly sculpt from the characters complete moral decay under extreme conditions, when fear for their own skin turns them into disgusting monsters. But, in my humble opinion, this is not always successfully and reasonably conditioned by the scenario. Here the characters are quite humane, except for one; doubters, but finding the strength to the last to remain human and act together. Apparently, everything depends on the subjective viewer’s opinion, which allows us to maintain mutual assistance in the most difficult circumstances, whether on a boat at sea or in boundless space. Times change, and man remains a man.
6 out of 10