Paradox Alice

I just got done watching this movie and for the record, I am glad I rented it. It's definitely worth a look see, provided you go in knowing what to expect. This is a B-movie. Think SyFy Channel, not Showtime.Right from the start, it's obvious from the introduction that the premise of this movie serves as a hand wave to allow the rest of the plot to seem plausible. That in of itself is a bit of a failing, but one easily overlooked when you view the previous works of Mako Pictures and all those involved. There's only so many ways you can have three guys survive the end of the world.Watching this movie, it becomes very clear how the producers chose to spend their money. The film takes place aboard a Water Tanker vessel, the USS Red Queen, though from the inside that's not too apparent. The interior shots look more like a series of bunkers than a spaceship. Lighting is minimal all over the ship and the only visible technology consists of a control room filled with a number of small CRT monitors, a single valve in a corridor, some wires in a crawlspace, and the microwave in the break room. The CGI effects used to create the external shots of the ship are quite dated by Hollywood standards, being on par with those of the mid-90s such as Babylon 5 or Hypernauts.One of the highlights of the film, from a technical standpoint at least, is the transformation scene. It's obvious the bulk of the special effects budget went into making Ethan Sharrett turn into Jeneta St. Clair. I wouldn't be surprised at all if they spent more money on this four-minute transformation than they did on all the external shots in the film. It is by far, the best depiction of physical gender transformation I have seen anywhere (including "Dr. Jekyll, Ms. Hyde," "Zerophilia," and that Mountain Dew Commercial featuring the Dude with the Magic Car Clicker).The characters in the movie are a bit bland and a bit two dimensional. The main character, Alex Foxe is the ship's second in command. He is originally portrayed as a playboy and womanizer, which makes it almost cliche that he would be the one who finds himself transformed into a woman. Once transformed, Foxe at first goes through an impossibly quick adjustment period before slipping completely into his role as a woman. This too is hand-waved by Foxe's comment that she can feel herself continuing to change mentally.The ship's captain, Jim Gray, serves as the "Good Guy" of the movie. He and Foxe share a comradery following some incident that occurred prior to the start of the film. Following the destruction of the Earth, he begins cutting himself and showing signs of PTSD, Dementia, or Alzheimer's, I'm really not certain which. It's his delusions that make him begin to see his dead wife in the place of his best friend, and leads to Foxe accepting the name "Alice."Lieutenant O'Byrne starts off as the young newbie aboard the ship, being both patronized and encouraged by the rest of the crew. He is highly religious and, following the destruction of Earth, advances his faith to psychotic levels. He becomes convinced that God has a plan, and that he is a prophet for the divine. What really irritates me about this character is he is written as the ship's science officer. Religious Zealotry aside, one would think anyone with even a modicum of scientific understanding would realize that three people - two male, one female - is not a sufficient genetic base with which to restart a species. He does have two shining moments however; the first being when he discusses betta fish and how they would kill each other if a female was entered into their habitat, thus foreshadowing the rest of the movie. The second, is when his head explodes, which frankly happened far too late in the movie, but did serve to set up Foxe for a great one-liner:O'Byrne: "You don't have the balls to press that button."[Foxe presses the button, causing O'Byrne's head to explode]Foxe: "I don't need them."The other two characters on the ship are barely characters. Kat Spencer is the ship's medical officer. She plays the only woman on the crew and is torpedoed through the abdomen and killed after maybe six lines because you can't have a movie about how "life finds a way" when there's a way sitting across the table. Really, her character's biggest contribution to the plot is that, by dying, there's no one to offer a scientific explanation as to WHY Foxe turns into a woman (since the aforementioned science officer was really just the expert on fish and headsplosions). All we're left with is a Wikipedia entry on Protandry and O'Byrne's belief that this is God's plan.Lastly, there's Red, the ship's AI. I would seem they were trying to create a kind of HAL dynamic with her, but the fact that her only interface with the crew is a set of wall-eyed binoculars that make it difficult to take her seriously. In truth, she seems to be more unstable than Gray. She relieves Gray of command before he's even shown signs of mental breakdown, siting his ignoring a core meltdown warning (a meltdown that never actually happens) and creative use of the ship's landing thrusters to get off Europa. She threatens to seal him in the bridge and cut off his oxygen when he gets aggravated at her decision to remove him from command, yet she does nothing to stop or even warn off O'Byrne when he kills Gray tries to rape Foxe. The last scene suggests this is intentional, as she is for some reason delivering the now pregnant Foxe to a group of shadow aliens enroute to a new garden world.I honestly cant figure out why the shadow aliens are there. It's as if the Writers were trying to Shyamalan the ending in order to make room for the possibility of a sequel, maybe? I don't know. For a movie that spent an hour and forty-eight minutes being about how life adapts and the various reactions from the crew to the trauma of watching your whole planet blow up, to cram aliens in during the last two minutes before the credits roll seems counter-productive.In the end, this movie makes about as much sense as Sharktopus. And really, that's the category it belongs in. SyFy could have made this movie with ten times the budget and come up with the same product. If you're looking for a blockbuster, go to the theater. But if, like me, you enjoy watching Made-for TV movies just to see how good a film can be made on a mediocre budget, then Paradox Alice is worth the price of Rental. Enjoy it for what it is.

This is the worst movie I've ever enjoyed. Imagine some high school kids learned the word protandry in biology class that day and later that night drank a gallon of Boone's Farm and started "what if"-ing.....how long would it take until you came up with a script in which they figured out how to have gay sex by turning the hot guy into a hot chick whose sole purpose is to work with the first two to repopulate the human race somewhere?You know it's going to be bad on every level possible and for such an infinite variety of reasons when you see the fish bowl on the spacecraft. So here's it is - 2 guy astronauts, 1 nerd evangelical and one actual girl astronaut are trying to save earth which is ravaging itself over water and other resources. Long story short. They go into "stasis" to return to earth and are awakened 2 hours out in the middle of a debris field which is, apparently, what's left of the moon. Earth has self destructed.The real girl astronaut dies (because god forbid that would make rebuilding the human race too effing easy) so we have a situation where there is still the one hot guy astronaut, the 2nd astronaut who started out as captain but was demoted by female Hal robot, sigh, and the boy evangelical astronaut who has the gold fish - a bowl with 3 males because, as he says, throw a female in and they all kill themselves...double sigh.......so now we have 3 dudes coming to terms with the fact that the human race is dead - church boy knows god will save them and well dontcha know the hot dude astronaut transforms, all alienlike, into a woman just like protandry specifies. So Alex becomes Alice, who by the way is still captain thanks to lady Hal. The believer astronaut gets creepier and creepier and the creepy ex captain becomes less creepy....so any one piece sucks...but put them all together and after you've said WTF - dismissed the absolutely cheesie special effects and the worst set design you've ever seen our born again dork hatches his evil plan to "have' Alice. Then of course you have to work in a scene where "eve" has an apple, says she's never had it before followed by a dreamy banana eating sequence which ends with creepy captain hitting on his ex-friend but she's all like "I'm so confused"........sigh.....where's our evil evangelical? he's up to no good but the fish are fine, though now they're down to 2 because one has died. Queue required nightmare montage so hot sexy actress astronaut can wake up all sweaty and glistening and watch how she learns to put on her makeup and do her nails because that's something all astronauts need to do ..... then our creepy believer dude shows his true colors ... he's God's prophet and she belongs to him and .........and the weirdest thing is that she looks so much like Marsha Brady. ....none of this can end well and it doesn't.....and all of this makes so much sense because, you know, when you're in the middle of the apocalypse a little Deuteronomy is never enough and gosh darn it you need a touch of Leviticus, a soupcon of insanity and you just keep watching because you know if you just pay attention you too will learn the secret of making a woman obey you even when she wants you dead....queue the 2001 space odyssey choir, watch the necessary rape scene and wait for Rosemary's baby to be born....or babies......and the final scene doesn't disappoint. They even managed to make the final credits annoying vocally but the whole thing in its entirety actually kind of works in this most pathetic effort of wasted talent. I counted over 20 computer graphic technicians in the credit but all they managed to come up with were Atari level effects. But it's a holiday and I have all day to waste on this nonsense. It was fun. But I wouldn't do it again.