Cosmic Sin (2021)

I knew that this was going to be a bad movie before I ever popped it on. This flick is best known as the movie that earned Bruce Willis a Razzie for worst performance that was later revoked when it was revealed that he was suffering from medical issues that affected his speech and memory. But how bad could it be? And was it really such a terrible performance?

The movie opens with a crawl about humanity colonizing space and the inevitable conflicts that those early colonies had with each other. One of those conflicts was resolved by a general dropping a “Q” bomb on a planet wiping out tens of millions of folks. What is a “Q” bomb? I guess it makes a black hole and destroys everything in the nearby solar system.

Now we move to a couple about to get busy on an uninhabited planet. Aliens show up and this first contact goes poorly. The surviving crew is brought back to Earth for interrogation but has been infected and controlled by the aliens. They go on the attack and the military eventually kills them all. The disgraced general played by Willis is recruited on a team that is teleported out to the last known location of the aliens. With them they take another “Q” bomb to wipe out the enemy. There is some back and forth about morality before they shoot it into a portal that wipes out the aliens killing the entire race. So much for morality I suppose.

First things first. Willis isn’t the reason that this movie sucks. His performance isn’t even all that bad. I mean it is flat and he delivers his dialogue without much effort but knowing what we know now it all makes sense. The truth is he is barely in the movie enough to impact it at all. Apparently, he was on set for a couple of days and was paid a couple million bucks for his time. That said the movie is terrible it just isn’t his fault.

The story is complete and utter garbage. We have an interesting idea where the military has in place a plan that is executed on first contact with an alien race. If it is a positive for the human race then everything is fine. If it goes badly then we murder them all. While that sort of overly simplistic agenda might be somewhat accurate to how humanity would respond (we do sort of suck if we are being honest) it makes for a terrible science fiction story. I kept waiting for some sort of message or really anything clever but nope. It went badly so genocide time!

Well fellas... I hope the checks cleared!

The execution of the plot doubles down on the suck. You get random characters that appear and disappear throughout the movie. There are some familiar faces in addition to Willis like Frank Grillo, Lochlyn Munro, and Costas Mandylor. They clearly weren’t all available on set on the same days as they rarely share scenes together. This I’m guessing was the primary reason that the story feels so disjointed and choppy.

There is also a lack of budget getting in the way. We do get some CGI spaceships but at times they look downright awful. The crew is teleported to the planet, so we don’t any actual scenes set in a ship, the camera just goes zipping by them. The aliens possess human beings, so they saved some cash there by just having folks dressed in black being the invaders. I guess that means after the aliens take them over they go change into matching outfits before assaulting the remaining humans. A lot of the action takes place on a nearby planet aka. the woods in Georgia where this was shot.

Terrible story, misspent budget, bad editing forced by cast members not being available for the entire shoot all ends up making Cosmic Sin a complete waste of time. Oh, and that damn title. If it is meant to imply the destruction of an entire alien species is supposed to be some underlying message of it being shameful or sinful, then maybe don’t give the aliens lines like “either you destroy us or we destroy you.” They clearly want to wipe out the human race so what the hell is this supposed cosmic sin? This one is trash and you can skip it.

 

© Copyright 2023 John Shatzer