UK. 2020.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Marc Price, Producer – Michelle Parkyn, Photography – Noel Darcy, Music – Adam Langston, Spaceship Visual Effects Supervisor – David Ross, Erebus Creature Designed by Alex Genn-Basch, Makeup Effects – Lea James. Production Company – Indeed Film/4 Digital Media/Posterity Entertainment/IMP Studios (Independent Moving Pictures)/Dead Pixel.
Cast
Phoebe Sparrow (Adler), Daisy Aitkens (Hazel Yaren), Simon Dwyer-Thomas (Erebus Drekks), Alistair Kirton (Colonel Danforth)
Plot
Grey Squadron is engaged in a space dogfight with the Drekk aliens. After being damaged in the shootout, the ship piloted by Adler and Yaren crashes on the nearby planet Erebus. With Yaren badly wounded, Adler sets up a survival tent in the inhospitable environment. She then tries to find a way to repair the ship to make it off world. This involves a journey across the inhospitable terrain to salvage a part from a crashed alien ship.
British director Marc Price first appeared with the micro-budgeted but modest zombie film Colin (2008). He subsequently went on to direct the drama Magpie (2013), Nightshooters (2018) and the Western A Fistful of Lead (2018). He has also produced Woods of Terror (2009) and Before Dawn (2012).
With Dune Drifter, you can complement Price on being able to make a Space Opera on an absolute economy budget. The film was shot during Covid lockdown in the UK. All of the space battle scenes we see at the start were shot in the living room of Price’s apartment using a single cockpit set with the actors delivering their lines by remote apps and the visual effects being added in afterwards.
The title seems to have been intended as a quick cash-in on the presumed release of Denis Villeneuve’s Dune: Part One (2021). However, Dune ended up being delayed (due to the Covid pandemic) and Dune Drifter came out first. Marc Price insists it wasn’t the case but it is hard to believe that he would not have given his film the title it has without an awareness of Villeneuve’s high-profile film, which had been announced since 2016, and that is was just a whopping coincidence that he planned to release his version around the original intended release date of Villeueuve’s film.
Dune Drifter is a slow film. There is like something like twenty minutes of space dogfight scenes with people in cockpits urgently making call signs. If you have seen Star Wars (1977) and any of its imitators, these scenes are overly familiar from the Death Star Trench run climax and endless copies of that. When it comes to the visual effects of the small ships attacking a larger enemy ship, I kept being reminded of the dogfights in tv’s Battlestar Galactica (2003-9).
Similarly, once we land on the planet, there are more long scenes taken up by Phoebe Sparrow tending wounded co-pilot Daisy Aitkens inside a survival tent. Again, this is Marc Price making a film with an absolute minimal location – almost everything takes place in the inside of the tent with some brief scenes out on the bare volcanic plain where the ship has crashed. I was reminded somewhat of the planetary survival scenes in Enemy Mine (1985). These scenes go on for another twenty or so minutes – when combined with the space war scenes, they serve to really drag the film’s pace out.
The film’s best scenes come after that with Phoebe Sparrow abandoned alone on the planet. These scenes were shot in Iceland, which lends its bare, treeless volcanic landscape to quite effectively create an alien world. Indeed, this is one of the few Alien Planets in SF where the planet is not automatically an M Class planet with breathable atmosphere. The scenes with Phoebe Sparrow abandoned alone and trying to survive in the harsh environment, fighting off aliens and trying to salvage a part from their ship so she can lift off all work quite reasonably.
Trailer here