Solar Crisis (1990)

(Second Viewing, On TV, June 1999) I had first seen this film on video in 1993 or 1994, and kept mostly good memories of this SF drama. It’s a measure of either malleable memory or evolving tastes that a second viewing several years later provoked an almost exactly opposite impression: Many special effects look cheap in this era of computer-generated imagery, the acting is laughably bad, the plot is beyond ludicrous and the dialogue plain silly. The science is so wrong that it’s charitable to suspect that the writer hasn’t got a clue. While some sequences do crank up the tension effectively, they’re almost immediately overshadowed by the remainder of this lousy film. If SF is a genre that provokes speculation, the best that Solar Crisis can do is to make one wonder what the flaming heck were Charlton Heston and Jack Palance doing in this piece of celluloid trash.