Mike Conway is a great guy and a great film maker, which is why I was really excited when he wrote to me and told me his new film Exile was finally finished and asked me if I wanted to see it.  Naturally I wrote back to him immediately and said, "Hell yeah!".  Unfortunately, Nic Brown ran into him at a film festival or something and ended up getting a copy before me.  You can check out his review of it in the May issue.  Anyway, I got mine now, so here's the review...

Exile is the story of three planets.  One is like Earth, full of resources, beautiful and lush.  Another is short on resources and the population has become little more than brutal pirates, constantly trying to steal the resources they need.  The third planet sits between the two inhabited ones.  It's habitable, but just barely.  The atmosphere is thin and it's been agreed by both sides that the planet is an off limits, no fly zone.

When Jason (Brian Sheridan), a freighter pilot has his freighter hijacked by one of the pirates, he and his two crew members end up crash landing on the desolate, middle planet, and unfortunately for Jason, he's blinded somehow in the crash.

The pirate is burned to death right after the crash, and a short time later, Jason's two crew members are killed by a native beast with tons of eyes and several poison injecting tentacles that induce paralysis when they hit you.  Jason manages to escape and stumbles upon the lab of a scientist who came alone to the planet to work on his android project.  The result was an android named Reyna.  A nearly indestructible killing machine capable of non-linear thinking, reason, and as Jason found out, even love.  Unfortunately, the man who created her had been killed, and she could only function when there was a human in the capsule so that the automated systems would run and she could recharge.  If there were no humans present, the systems would not operate and she would run out of charge within three days.  Thus began a symbiotic relationship between the two, which developed eventually into mutual love.  Unfortunately, when the rescuers came for Jason, she wasn't so eager to let him go.

Now, Mike Conway has always made great films.  I love Terrarium, and I really liked The Awakening a lot.  So how does this film measure up?

Well, There's a whole lot I really liked about this film, but there's two things I didn't.  First, there was too much CGI used for certain things, like fog, blood squirts when people got shot, etc...  In some cases, like with the monsters on the planet, it enhanced their look rather nicely, but seeing it used for things like the blood squirts and the fog just didn't do it for me.  The fog looked very two-dimensional, and the blood...well...Mike was always big on squibs.  He made his own and they always looked great when they went off.  Doing it with CGI in this film after seeing his masterful use of squibs in his previous films was rather disappointing to me.

The second thing that kept me from really connecting with this film the way I would have liked was that I couldn't really feel for any of the characters except the android Reyna, played by Heather Lei Guzzetta, who I actually felt sorry for.  All she wanted to do was survive, and in the process she found not only love, but also obsession, desperation and other human emotions.  It was an interesting and intense part of the story that had some really cool aspects to it.  There was something about rest of the cast though that I just couldn't connect with.  I wanted to feel for these people and to identify with them, and I guess I did a little, at least with Jason, but not as much as I would have liked.

Now onto the good stuff...

Mike shot this film in Utah, using the terrain there as the setting for the planet where the main characters are stranded.  This in and of itself probably explains the lack of squibs and real fog, but I'd have to ask Mike about that.  In any case, it was a great setting for the film.  The country was desolate, but had a beauty and mystery to it as well, which really lent itself to the story.

The whole aspect of the story where the love develops between Jason and Reyna and her protectiveness and possessiveness of him also worked really well.  Heather Lei Guzzetta handled the part beautifully even though it had to be a really strange part to play.  She was actually pretty emotionless in her expression much of the time, and yet she brought out the feelings that her character was developing and made it believable.  Brian Sheridan, though he didn't always play the blind bit effectively, was believable in how he played the developing relationship with Reyna, and the eventual love he came to feel for her, which later turned into a desperate attempt to escape when she started killing off his rescuers.  I actually felt bad at how it all turned out.  It was sad it had to end that way, but me feeling that say says a lot about the strength of the story itself.

The music in the film is something else that shined.  Mike Conway is a great synth player and has some seriously powerful synths at his disposal.  As such, he always does the music and ambient background stuff for his films himself...and it's always awesome.  He has a real knack for bringing out just the right feel in a scene, which probably has a lot to do with the fact that he wrote and directed the movie.  It's always easier to write music for a story you're intimately involved with so you know going in just exactly what feel you want for each scene and can write a score that suits it all beautifully.

Visuals are something else that have always been one of Mike's strong points.  His camera work is always excellent, and he has a particular innate ability to frame his shots just right so as to create just the visual he wants the viewer to get out of the scene, even though the real setting may be something totally different than what the viewer is thinking they're seeing.  This was something he did to great effect in both Terrarium and The Awakening, and it's always a pleasure to see how he handles the visual challenges of each particular film.

Speaking of visuals, the monster in this film was really pretty sweet looking.  There was a base outfit for the creature, which was then jazzed up with some CGI effects in post, including a bulging head with multiple eyes and a rippling, weird looking body effect.  As far as space monsters go, this one was really creative and certainly nothing I would have expected.

As for the lighting, sound, editing, pacing and all that...it's never been an issue in Mike's films.  He's great at what he does.  His films always move along at just the pace they should, aren't ever too long or too short for the story, are always well edited and most importantly, you can always hear what everyone is saying.  Bad sound on the dialogue can ruin a film faster than anything, and I can't tell you how many films I've seen ruined by that one problem alone.  Again, I never have to worry about things like that with Mike's films.

Exile is a good example of how you don't need a huge budget to make a good sci-fi film.  You just need talent, a great story to work with...and a really cool looking monster never hurts either.  Despite the few problems I had with the film, overall this is yet another winner from Mike Conway.

The DVDs of Exile are now available for purchase on the Midnight Sun Entertainment website.  Click here to order yourself a copy of this or any of Mike's other great films.