UK. 2020.
Crew
Director/Screenplay – Tom Paton, Producers – Alan Latham, Tom Mattinson & Phil McKenzie, Photography – George Burt, Music – Max Sweiry, Visual Effects Supervisor – Ben Louden, Visual Effects – Viridian FX, Edison Animation – Haeun Kang, Special Effects – Bloody Stuff (Supervisor – Keith Harding), Production Design – Victoria Richards. Production Company – Highfield Grange Studios/Goldfinch.
Cast
Stephen Moyer (Bran), Tala Gouveia (Ohsha), Mike Beckingham (Voice of Edison). John Rhys-Davies (Henry), Casper Van Dien (Decker), Emily High (Riley), Shayne Ward (Jimmy), Alana Wallace (Jane)
Plot
32 years ago, a stargate appeared in orbit above Earth, allowing transportation to another solar system. With Earth sliding into a new Ice Age, colonists have relocated to the planet Rhea on the other side of the gate. Bran wakes up in an escape pod, the sole survivor of the colony transport ship he was aboard. With oxygen supplies dwindling, his A.I. Edison directs him to rendezvous with The Nysa, a Rhean transport ship that appears to be abandoned. Bran docks and boards The Nysa to find all aboard dead, before being attacked by one surviving crew-member Ohsha. They fight as he restarts the ship’s engines but she tries to stop him. The two make a cautious peace as Bran comes to understand the hostility between Earthers and colonists and how the ship was in fact intended as part of a plan to kill colonists.
British director Tom Paton has been making a modest output of B-budget films ever since his first appearance with the post-apocalyptic film Pandorica (2016). He has since directed the likes of the vampire film Redwood (2017), the quite good Black Site (2018) about a secret government agency set up to deal with Lovecraftian entities, the timeloop film Stairs (2019), the non-genre military action film 400 Bullets (2021), the psycho-thriller Assailant (2022), Us or Them (2023) about a deadly game and the animated Where the Robots Grow (2024).
G-Loc falls into a series of spacegoing films made on low budgets. They can’t quite be called Space Opera because they lack the planet-hopping adventure aspect, nor are realistically grounded works set within the confines of the Solar System a la Gravity (2013). Mostly for budgetary reasons they are confined to a single ship or some venture out onto a planetary surface – see other examples such as Scavengers (2013), Starship: Rising (2014) and Starship: Apocalypse (2014), Rogue Warrior: Robot Fighter (2016), Breach (2020) and Battle for Pandora (2022).
To this extent, G-Loc is admirably contained. It all takes place aboard a spaceship in transit. There is a principal cast of only two present, with an A.I. hologram and a third person appearing in the last act, plus occasional flashbacks to Stephen Moyer back on Earth where he is joined by John Rhys-Davies. As with Pandorica, Paton is interested in creating an evolved future form of language that we see Tala Gouveia speaking.
Tom Paton creates okay drama out of this. I would have liked to have seen the film with more of a budget that might have allowed it to have detailed more of the interplanetary background and politics it sets up. You feel that science could have been more rigorous – at the speed the ship is going, the debris it strikes would have had devastating impact. I didn’t feel that G-Loc was bad by any means, although on the other hand it is not something that stood out memorably for me either.
One quibble might be the title G-Loc. At first glance, it makes you think of some kind of mecha/power suit fantasy. However, G-Loc is a term from the aerospace industry that stands for Gravity-Induced Loss of Consciousness – where excessive g-forces experienced by pilots and astronauts causes them to pass out, although this is never explained in the film. To at least justify such, we do see a couple of such scenes here where people are struggling in high g, even a fight scene that occurs during heavy gravity acceleration.
Trailer here