Red Faction: Origins (Spoiler Free Preview)
I went into Red Faction: Origins not expecting much, I mean it had the history of all those really bad Video Game based movies behind it (I’m looking at you Super Mario Brothers). Plus it was a SyFy Channel original movie, which are traditionally horrifically bad movies. So Red Faction had 2 strikes against it right out of the gate. That being said I enjoyed Red Faction: Origins, it was a good solid SciFi action movie. It was full of some really good one liners, mixing the appropriate amount of humor and seriousness. The acting was good, and the storyline was much better than any SyFy Original movie I’ve seen in the last several years. The sets and the special effects were also of higher production values than SyFy usually manages.
I’m not sure how much of the higher production values are due to the fact that this was a joint venture between SyFy and THQ (who develop the Red Faction video games). I have never played the Red Faction video games so I am not sure how accurate Red Faction: Origins is to the games, but I have a feeling the good special effects are due to SyFy being able to pull the panoramic scenes of Mars and shots of space ships from the video games. I also don’t know how much of the good scripting and story line are attributable to SyFy or if THQ and the game developers handled most of that. The only thing I know for sure is that if SyFy could manage to make all of their Original movies as good as Red Faction: Origins they would get a much higher viewership and would probably sell a lot more DVDs.
I would give Red Faction Origins a solid 3.5 out of 5, that may not sound like a very high review, but keep in mind that I rate most Syfy Original Movies a 1 or 1.5.
