How Jason Kabel and Kim Smedley flew to fight the villain Omus If the title of the film should contain the dominant idea, then it is enough to take one word from the names of different films to represent the general direction of the works of director George McCowan: “Escape ...”, “Invaders ...”, “Squad ...”. "Army ...", "War ...", "Gang ..." and so on until the last TV series "War of the Worlds" (1990). There is no negative subtext behind this “micro-research”, but only an attempt to understand what H.G. Wells has to do with the film with the “tighteningly hypnotizing” title “Shapes of the Future”, except, of course, similarity with the title of the great science fiction script – “The Face of the Future” (1935).
H.G. Wells described his work as follows: It is, above all, a spectacular film. It shows how modern war is destroying the world, how the fabric of society is being torn apart, how the world is being ravaged by a new pestilence - a "vagrant disease"... In the picture of George McCovan none of this, but there are 2 "adapters" 80-year-old script Wells: Mike Chad (debut) and Joseph Glazner (debut). There’s a third writer who’s worked mostly on short films. As a result, we have the work of the Great Dreamer very boldly “adapted” by two debutants.
It is clear that such a “rattling mixture” does not bode well, but the Russian viewer is not from the timid ten, so boldly rushes into the abyss of the film with a “length” of 100 minutes and a cost of 3.2 million Canadian dollars. It's a pretty good start. A far (how much?) future. The land has become uninhabitable. Homo Cosmicus moved to domed cities on the moon and elsewhere. From this “farther”, from the planet “Delta-3”, where the vital mineral Radic Q-2 is mined, an unmanned cargo plane arrives and in the most shameless way rams the protective dome of one of the cities.
For some reason, the drone can not be shot down. Probably because the "defense" commands not a sufficiently energetic young lady, and even the cyberbrain Lomox. The shipwreck causes a lot of problems, although the damaged dome immediately begins to repair. (This is a very interesting and informative moment, because the dome from “Battlefield: Earth” (2000) is a real “childish babble” compared to the one shown, but at the same time “patch up” it manages to fantastically quickly: spraying in the form of an inversion trace from the rocket plane merged into NOTHING – and everything is ready!)
The people sigh with relief, but then a person named Omus (Jack Palanks) comes into contact with the Moon and declares that he and his "companions"-robots have overthrown the power of Governor Nikki (Carol Linley) on the planet Delta-3, and that he wants to become commander-in-chief of the forces of the Moon and Earth. Not much, not less! Towards the end, Omus’s ambitions swell to incredible proportions, and he declares himself already an Imperator of the planet!
In low-grade films, the lack of a good plot is almost always compensated by extremely loud words: “emperor” (and in the whole “empire” – only 7 people and 8 robots!); The universe (often the director does not even try to imagine the size of our galaxy, in which there are only 100,000,000 stars!) What kind of universe, even if "in your own cosmic home" to fly "from side to side" at the speed of light will take no more than 100,000 years!
But the director doesn’t look that far. Why? It is enough to draw a model of a starship, “call” it, for example, “StarTrek” and let yourself fly to where a crazy villain, like a stingy knight, “slows down” over a thing called Radic Q-2 (another “beauty”, for which nothing is worth). Perhaps George McCowan wanted to make a movie that would please the audience. And there are sure to be, but they will not be very many years, because for an adult audience, the film is extremely naive, to say the least.