Movie - Paradox Alice [Japan DVD] BLSM-14

The acting and story were great. The effects for such a low-budget production were spectacular in my opinion.I feel that this story would have been even better if there had been more time to show/explore the character development (it had a somewhat "rushed" feel to it).The only nit-pick I have with this movie were some (very) minor issues with real-life physics as portrayed in the movie, but they did not take away from the story at all.The DVD arrived in a professional looking / commercial DVD case, with a nice-looking label. The disc arrived with a couple fingerprints and problems playing in one of my DVD players, even after cleaning. Later, I discovered issues with disc navigation in what I assume to be the second layer of the disc, as if the disc was burned too fast (skips, freezes, stuttering, and perpetual repeat of a small section). If I just let it play from the beginning, it will work just fine on all but one (the oldest) of my DVD players. I'm thinking that this is just a problem with my disc... but in case it is not, it is listed here for your consideration.

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.

I'm occasionally willing to endure mediocre effects, bad acting and subpar writing in a film that's camp or not taking itself too seriously. This film isn't one of those films. This film thought it was a real film and just turned out horrendously bad.The premise was intriguing enough to get me to at least consider it: three men in space head home to Earth only to find it destroyed. Upon discovering that they are the last three humans alive, one of them spontaneously transforms into a woman, presumably to propagate the species. I'm not sure which paradox the title is referring to - that one of them becomes a woman is more of a mystery than a paradox - but I found myself asking questions every two minutes as this rollercoaster of idiocy and ham-handedness barreled on (spoilers, assuming you can spoil a film this godawful), but mostly of the "Are you kidding?" variety: the newly breasted space jockey's name is "Fox", he immediately begins to run around the ship in nothing more than a sports bra, despite being "cold all of the time" because he's "frail now," except for the times when he's sporting a lovely pink robe and a French manicure. Naturally the remaining two crew members vacillate between rapey and creepy, both of whom seem way more horny than bothered by the fact that every person and thing they've ever known was bombed to space dust. In an attempt to add a fourth character where three would do, we're given a HAL-inspired ship's computer that can demote personnel and control the ship's environments and doors, but can't keep a stalking rapist away from mankind's last hope. Given that the computer is personified by a rejected Johnny 5 prototype that shakes like a Muppet when it speaks so we know where the voice is coming from, it's no wonder it's useless.This is easily the most sexist sci-fi film I've ever seen, and I'm not generally predisposed to dismiss something on that factor alone. However, this tripe was so demeaning and over the top ridiculous in its attempts to get to all the "sexy" parts of being a woman trapped in space with two creeps - flashing her boobs, doing her nails, bating her eyelashes, getting knocked up on her first try/rape/asking for...all after being a woman for all of two days - that it ejects common sense, character development and whatever ethical dilemma the title might have referred to if the filmmakers actually knew what the word "paradox" meant. This isn't even good for a drinking game. It's an embarrassment to watch, and everyone associated with making it shouldn't be allowed near a camera again...even the caterer.