User Reviews

The main idea, that an energy being descended to Earth 4 billion years ago in order to monitor and create intelligent life on the planet, was interesting.

Minor spoilers ahead.

The being, now "encased" in a rocky 1/2 mile tall ship/monolith, periodically wipes the planet clean and starts over with a new dominant species. Of course this also explains the extinction of the dinosaurs.

Mankind is on the short list to be purged in the present day. Maybe it's going to try raccoons or something next.

The acting is mediocre at best. You know it's bad when Brian Thompson is one of the better actors in it. The other characters are cut out 2 dimensional figures that nobody really cares about. They cut so many corners in order to squeeze this into 90 minutes they lose anything of value. Maybe as a mini-series with better actors and more complex plot development it might have resulted in a superior effort worthy of the basic premise. Unfortunately they chose the quickie version and it shows.

All in all an OK attempt at a difficult plot. I'd give it a 5 or 6.

Spoilers herein.

This film has bad acting, poor production values and stinking dialog. No matter. Science fiction is held to a different standard than all else, because often the idea behind the project is strong enough to carry the day. Witness `Forbidden Planet.'

Superficially, the idea behind this is the most ordinary in the genre: humans discover an alien artifact that exhibits mystical powers. Often, those powers imply the creation of ourselves. But this effort seems to add nothing new to the standards: `2001/2010' and `Mission to Mars.' But a clever viewer may see something interesting here.

IMDB doesn't say, but the writer is probably Terri Neish, who also appears here as the lovely Bhutan mother. It doesn't take much to see an original ambiguity that the studio deadheads erased: that the appearance of the object, indeed its creation, was caused by the child. She must have conceived him immaculately, something mirrored at the end. (Virgin birth is a tradition that apparently first appeared in this part of the world and was spliced -- as it was with other messiah accounts -- onto the Jesus story some time after the early gospels.)

His powers manifest the object and control its behavior. All of a sudden one can see some interesting structure. The author of the story is the author of the child who is the author of the object who is the author of the viewers. Now that's promising. It probably explains why they sought Ryan O'Neal. He plays a somewhat similar role in Kubrick's exploration of this idea in `Barry Lyndon.'

Some quibbles:

-- NSA doesn't do what they show here. They just listen and worry about code. She must be thinking of the NSC plus Special Ops assets.

-- The shape of the object is somewhat clever. Would be better if the rock were slowly moving like a tornado. That was probably intended because it spins toward the end. Troubling shortcut: the shape of the object is precisely the same no matter what the perspective.

--The code to unlock the object is too childish. If the radial arrangement of the planets around the sun were important, so would be their distance from the sun, tilting from the ecliptic plane and possibly a few other characteristics. But even then why? The scifi template implies it is a test of how far we have evolved. But observation is not understanding.

Ted's Evaluation -- 1 of 4: You can find something better to do with this part of your life.

Oh my! What a wonderfully awful film this turned out to be. It even had Troy..er I mean Marc McClure in it. "You may remember him from..." No! No. I'll stop now.

Anyway, Epoch is a film with a simple enough plot. Think 2001 A Space Odyssey, but without any space bits. Basically, an alien artifact appears in Bhutan and a team is sent to investigate. A team which includes the likes of David Keith, Craig Wasson and Ryan O'Neal. Poor old Ryan was looking a little the worse for wear in this one. It's been a long time since Love Story, for sure.

Anyway, the action is pretty lame and I got a good laugh out of the scissor-lift HQ truck (watch and you'll see what I mean). The plot is pretty hokey and has more holes than a swiss cheese. I'd like to give you a spoiler alert, but honestly, I'm not ruining anything by telling you this. The artifact was put here by aliens eons ago. Every now and again, it pops up and, if whatever civilisation is not advanced enough to deactivate it, it wipes that civilisation out completely and disappears for another few millions of years. I can't honestly recall if they said so or not in the film, but the implication was that it wiped out the dinosaurs.

Now, call me picky, but I have trouble understanding just why an alien race would create such a device. Given the timescales involved in life forming and evolving to a civilised state, what do they get out of it? And since the device could wipe out a civilisation just a few years before it was able to deactivate the artifact, surely that would be counter-productive (to whatever motive the aliens had in the first place). Far better to create the device to wipe out any advanced species before it became a threat to the creators. Yet this is clearly not the aim of the artifact.

And what wonderful test of civilisation do our humble human heroes perform to deactivate the device? Perhaps solving some complex alien language and pressing the "off" button? Or simply providing the missing part to some quantum mechanics equation? No, all our heroes do in the end is nuke the artifact. A triumph of brute force over ingenuity. No thought required, just fry it.

The only small ray of sunshine in this otherwise overcast film was Brian Thompson. He regularly plays bit parts in films and TV and usually ends up the villain or goon. Here he plays a Special Forces Captain. But despite his square jawed glaring, even his dialogue and part are dismal and forgettable.

SUMMARY: One to miss.

But so what, if you were channel surfing looking for something to watch then this one will suffice for an hour and a half...Epoch may be the classic B move, but it actually has some charm. The plot is way out there for all us SciFi fanatics, and the acting is almost believable, so heck, give it a shot with a bit of popcorn and long for those days of no CGI and half baked movies that only wanted to entertain you...

And no thnking needed...