Cosmic Sin

Year 14, Day 16 - 1/16/22 - Movie #4,017

BEFORE: Frank Grillo carries over from "Boss Level", and I'm kicking off a week of Bruce Willis movies, most of which are streaming on Netflix.  Today's film has a very low score on the IMDB, so I guess I'm not expecting much, at this point my watchlist on Netflix is so big, I'll take clearing four or five films off of there as some form of a win, though. 

Last December I needed a couple Bruce Willis films to help me make a connection, but I just didn't have many slots left in the year at that time, so I was unable to squeeze any others in.  When I saw how many were on the list, though, I vowed to circle back to him, so here I go.  I'd rather burn these films off in January, anyway, because early in the year, I've got slots to spare.  Well, I really don't because any extra slots filled here I'll have to account for at the end of 2022, so if I run out of room then I'll know who to blame. 

THE PLOT: Seven rogue soldiers launch a preemptive strike against a newly discovered alien civilization in the hopes of ending an interstellar war before it starts. 

AFTER: Yes, this is a terrible movie - but I can't just say that and walk away, I have to explore WHY this movie is terrible, at least to some degree.  The title "Cosmic Sin" refers to the genocide of another civilization, which is obviously a sin, a really BIG one, on a cosmic level.  But for these soldier/astronauts, it's also the NAME of their mission, so this means they're up to no good, right?  This must be what Donald Trump's "Space Force" turns into, 500 years from now.  Sign up, travel the cosmos, meet interesting new alien races, and kill them.

The good news here is that it's the year 2525, and as Zager & Evans once sang, somehow mankind is still alive.  But it's a complicated story, which the film boils down to some simple historical events listed at the start of the movie - in 2031, the first Mars colony was founded.  In 2042 some kind of (unexplainable) Alliance was formed, and quantum propulsion allowed (will allow) humanity to travel outside the solar system.  Then in 2281 the Mars colony failed (will fail) for some reason, and humanity survives only in three places, Earth, Zafdie and Ellora.  It's also pretty maddening that we don't see any of those in this movie.  

Things were pretty great (?) until Zafdie tried to secede from the Union (oh, if ONLY there were a historical precedent for what to do when a colony wants to secede...I guess we shouldn't wish for things we can't have...). So instead of learning from the U.S. Civil War, Earth instead went with the solution that ended World War II, just drop a bomb on them.  That was an A-bomb, this was a Q-bomb (Q is for quantum) but the principle is the same, millions of deaths are OK as long as America (or Earth) comes out on top.  The war hero (villain?) who dropped the bomb is James Ford, played by Bruce Willis, the go-to actor whether you need to blow up an asteroid about to hit the Earth or a rogue colony on another planet. 

For some reason, that's the best option here, a "pre-emptive" strike, which, in the end, is the same thing as a "strike", it's just using the excuse that the aliens are PROBABLY going to kill us all as an excuse to kill them all.  For James Ford, it's a way to get his military rank back and his dishonorable discharge reversed, but really, is this the best way to handle an alien race, shouldn't we try diplomacy first?  I mean, it turns out these parasitic aliens DID intend to wipe us all out, but the soldiers here didn't KNOW that at the time, they were just erring on the side of caution, which I don't think is enough of a reason to commit such a cosmic sin.  It sets a bad precedent for future interstellar relations, to start with - Earthlings will always be known as the culture that shot first and asked questions later.  Which may be accurate, but I just don't think it's the reputation that we want, even if it's the one we deserve. 

The rest of the film is a big pile of hot garbage, though - junk science abounds, the people who work on the quantum bomb don't even seem to understand what they're doing, and come on, the lead character is placed on a team with his ex-wife just so he can work out his personal issues and blow up aliens at the same time?  Give me a break. It's just a shoot 'em up at the end of the day, and any technical problems that arise manage only to delay the Big Boom just so the whole film can be extended out close to 90 minutes.  This film won't take up a lot of your time, but it also won't provide any nutritional value for your brain - the future, unfortunately, is just more of the same old, just in space. 

Also starring Bruce Willis (last seen in "Marauders"), Brandon Thomas Lee, Corey Large (last seen in "Lone Survivor"), Perrey Reeves (last seen in "Kicking and Screaming"), C.J. Perry (last seen in "Pitch Perfect 2"), Lochlyn Munro (last seen in "The Predator"), Costas Mandylor (last seen in "Mobsters"), Adelaide Kane, Eva De Dominici, Sarah May Sommers (last seen in "Once Upon a Time... In Hollywood"), Trevor Gretzky, Johnny Messner (last seen in "The Sweetest Thing"), Trevor Brotherton, Everly Large, Francis Cronin. 

RATING: 3 out of 10 converted jukeboxes