Your ambulance is suffering a minor malfunction. Would you care for another?
When a space-going EMT vessel receives a message from a notorious personality on an unapproved communications link, calling for help, the crew of Nightingale 229 must decide whether to respond or not to a possibly dubious communication, and, true to their calling, they do respond. Unfortunately, the interdimensional jump kills the ship’s Captain, and they emerge in the midst of a damaging meteor-filled region, with a high-gravity blue giant star just nearby.
Thus starts Supernova (2000).
The surviving crew is led by the second pilot, a hardened veteran, who manages to keep the ship mostly intact, with the exception of maneuvering fuel lost to the meteor field. But far more dangerous is the blue giant, which is dragging them in to a fiery doom, and in order to survive they need to wait for the dimensional drive to recharge, which it turns out will be just a moment shorter than when the blue giant will incinerate them.
And then an escape pod, or something small, arrives with the author of the distress signal, who claims to be the son of the man whose name was on the message. Self-confident, he is a man left behind by an informal team of salvagers, he claims, but when his small ship is investigated thoroughly, an alien artifact is found.
And eventually the survivor is revealed to be something akin to a God. A God who intends to take the artifact to Earth – and detonate it.
So the science is somewhat spotty, the plot has some holes in it (an example being that the crew believes the Captain deliberately used a defective jump pod for the rescue trip, but never explain why he did so), and defeating a God in one-on-one battles is always a chancy business.
But this is a movie relentless in its pacing. Even the slower parts are full of tension and puzzlement: why is the rescued man so sure of himself? What draws the med-tech so consistently to the alien artifact? And why is that other med-tech making such poor choices? Is it the rescued man’s powers? Or is she just an idiot? And why why why, oh rescued guy? But such is the pacing, the obstacles dodged or overcome, that the questions may come later, after the movie has finished and you’ve come down from the little adrenaline high you’ve been riding.
If you buy into it in the first place. And that could be dicey. This is not a hidden gem, and most reviewers appear to hate it. But if you’re looking for a late night adrenaline run and are not feeling too critical, this might be the right one for you.
