I first read about this movie on the Dark Horizons web site. They didn't say much other than it was a science fiction movie and there were some production troubles. I wasn't too sure I was going to see it, but some of the early tv commercials made it look good. Other tv commercials indicated that this was a standard sci-fi thriller.

The premise is that an Emergency Medical Rescue Ship investigates a distress signal coming from a rogue moon that houses an abandoned mining base. The moon has been captured by a Blue Giant and is slowly drifting into it. Meanwhile, the man in distress is not all that he seems. The movie reminded me of Event Horizon, with that sort of they find something that is inimical to mankind. People die in horrible ways and the evil thing is eventually destroyed.

James Spader is the star. And I didn't recognize him until I saw the credits; heck, not even then. I had to go back and watch the Stargate movie to see the resemblence, and it is there after looking at it hard. Anyway, the character reminded me of Jeff Goldblum when he's not funny. The guy is serious, has this weird way of talking, all emotionless, or rather more like not varying in tone or emotion. James Spader was better in Stargate. But now that I've been watching the tv series, I think that Michael Shanks has done a better job with the character. Of course he's had ten times more screen time for me to make that decision.

The other main character is played by Angela Bassett, who I also didn't at all recognize. I did recognize Lou Diamond Phillips. The acting is fine, since I didn't recognize any of the stars, although not stellar since this isn't a the kind of movie where an actor can really show his stuff. The plot is relatively simple and rather predictable. It's easy to write that it was predictable after the fact. While watching the movie the plot can go in one of several different and equally believable ways. That it chose to use one of those ways doesn't mean I saw it coming five minutes into the movie.

One of the hard parts of doing a movie (or other story) review is that you can't give away the ending, and probably not much of the plot, so as not to spoil it for readers. You can take the position that people who read revies are prepared for a little bit of spoiler material, but it's still a nebulous line to me. What I can say is that this movie was not really all that impressive. It's nice to watch, but if you've seen Alien, or Event Horizon, or any other sort of people-in-a-ship-with-something-that's-killing-them movie then this movie has few plot novelties. There is some slightly interesting tech, like the faster- than-light drive and the Blue Giant swirling away some of its mass to a nearby black hole, or the other thing that's central to the movie.

But this is not my type of movie, and the overall quality isn't good enough for me to overlook the fact that it's a scary movie. So I can't recommend it unless you're really into the genre or are a fan of one of the actors. Not to say that I didn't enjoy it, just that I didn't have to see it and I wouldn't have missed anything if I hadn't.

Looking up the entry for Supernova in IMDB, I see it has a rating of 4 out of 10 with 243 votes. The problem I have with a 1-10 scale is that it's too varied for doing one or a very few ratings. If you're rating a couple of dozen things, then you'll need that kind of differentiation, but if you're rating only one item, what does 4 mean compared to 5? The other thing is that people rate at 1 or 10 to influence the overall rating. Anyway, that's another review and maybe I'll get better with more practice, but I was kind of stretching this one to get it up to an acceptable length.