Osiris Child, The (2016) [Blu-ray]
Action | Adventure | Drama | Fantasy | Horror | Sci-Fi | Thriller

Tagline: War. Friendship. Survival.

When a dangerous outbreak threatens to destroy everyone living on a newly colonized planet, Lt. Kane Sommerville (Daniel MacPherson) goes against orders and leaves his station to rescue his young daughter (Teagan Croft). Desperate to get to her before it's too late, Kane enlists the help of an escaped prisoner (Kellan Lutz) as they battle their way through the chaos of a planet on the verge of annihilation. With the odds stacked against them, saving his little girl may be humanity's last chance at survival.

Storyline: Set in a time of interplanetary colonization, Sy Lombrok (Kellan Lutz), a former nurse who is now a drifter with a haunted past, forms an unlikely alliance with Kane Sommerville (Daniel MacPherson), a lieutenant who works for off-world military contractor Exor. In a race against time they set out to rescue Kane's young daughter Indi (Teagan Croft) amid an impending global crisis precipitated by Exor. Written by Teaser-Trailer.com

Reviewer's Note: Reviewed by Michael Reuben, December 11, 2017 An Australian-produced independent feature, The Osiris Child is optimistically subtitled as "Volume One" of a hoped-for science fiction series. But if director Shane Abbess and his co-writer (and co-producer and composer) Brian Cachia do manage to raise the money for a sequel, they should follow the suggestion of Tom Hardy's character in Inception and "dream bigger, darling". Osiris was obviously made with great enthusiasm, but it's a derivative work, attempting to disguise its borrowed thrills with a fractured narrative structure that's more gimmick than organic (and isn't all that original either).

In the future, a corporation that isn't named Weyland-Yutani is terra-forming with prison labor on an unspecified planet that isn't called Fury 161 or LV-426. But something has gone wrong on the surface. The prison population has rioted, and a horde of experimentally bred creatures housed in cells that are not located on a military ship called the Auriga has been set loose. The ship's commander, General Lynex (Rachel Griffiths), has decided to sterilize the entire operation with a nuclear explosion, although she doesn't need to come out and say what Ripley said in Aliens, because everyone already knows that nuking the site from orbit is the only way to be sure.

The general's decision doesn't sit well with Lt. Kane Sommerville (Daniel MacPherson), a mercenary working for Lynex but definitely not a Colonial Marine, with a young daughter (Teagan Croft) on the surface, whom he barely knows and whose name is Indi and definitely not Newt. Against orders, Kane pilots a shuttle to the surface to rescue the girl, while an ominous countdown to the blast periodically flashes on the screen in the style of 24—although it isn't quite the same as Alien and Aliens, since the countdown isn't solemnly intoned by a computer-generated monotone. On the surface, Kane joins forces with an escaped convict (Kellan Lutz) whose name is Sy Lombrok and certainly not Dillon. Switching out of the Alien franchise, Osiris dips into the wellspring of all contemporary dystopian tales filmed in Australia by sending Kane and Sy across blighted desert landscapes inhabited by outlaws straight from George Miller's Mad Max franchise. The most memorable are Gyp and Bill (Isabel Lucas and Luke Ford), a pair who could have been part of Toecutter's crew in the original Mad Max and whose vehicle is necessary if Kane and Sy are to have any hope of reaching Indi in time.

Abbess and Cachia chop up their tale into seven chapters with portentous titles like "Manifest Destiny" and "Original Sin", and they use this elaborate scaffolding to jump backward and forward in time. It's a weighty and distracting apparatus to impose on the movie's slim ninety-minute running time, especially once you realize that it's nothing more than a series of tarted-up flashbacks. Osiris' creators are hardly the first storytellers to discover the utility of withholding a character's background until a strategic point in the tale when you want the audience to reevaluate what's already been shown, but in the extras they talk like it's a brand-new technique of which they're the proud inventors. The real trick is to introduce such revelations fluidly, without a lot of fanfare, so that the character revelations don't get buried under the filmmakers' machinations. Maybe next time.

Osiris has its moments, most of them courtesy of supporting players like Temuera Morrison, who plays a sadistic prison warden. It's a trite role, but Morrison, who was so electrically memorable in Once Were Warriors, delivers his lines with a frightful conviction that breaks through the trite proceedings. And Lucas and Ford bring a warped sense of humor to their portrayals of Gyp and Bill, making the most of limited screen time to play a pair of depraved party animals who don't care so much if the world is ending as long the sex, drugs and rock 'n' roll continue to the very last minute.

The Osiris Child has an interesting (if improbable) conclusion that tosses out intriguing possibilities for future installments. Next time, Abbess and Cachia should try a straightforward story in chronological order. Rather than concealing narrative problems, that traditional form makes them easier to spot (and hopefully repair). Rent or stream if curious.

[CSW] -1.3- One should never do the prequel first. Disappointment. I was hoping for a decent science fiction movie and instead got low budget monsters. Most of the acting was wooden and it had the absolute worst monster costumes and makeup ever. The story line is incoherent. As a prequel for the "real" movie it is barely okay, the monster suits and monsters have to be improved, and their back story told. I understand that the book could get inside the monster's heads but this movie didn't even try. This whole prequel could have been boiled down to 30 minutes. So should they get a pass from me, no, it is the opposite, I should have passed on them.
[V4.0-A3.0] MPEG-4 AVC - No D-Box


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