8/10
This is a hell of a thing to try to make sense of, from all angles - in terms of what comes up on the screen and how it even got made in the first place. I didn't investigate too much but writer/director Panos Cosmatos seems to have no prior film credits aside from being a second unit video assist operator on 1993's Tombstone (?!) yet somehow scraped together the funding to put together one of the craziest, most ridiculous sci-fi mindtrips I've ever seen. Unabashedly influenced by 2001: ASO, THX 1138, Solaris, etc, it tells the very loose story of a young woman being held captive by a strange doctor in a bizarre laboratory in the 80's. The brunt of the filmmaking process was heavily weighted in favor of costumes, set design, special effects and a great soundtrack, and the story suffers dramatically - not that Cosmatos seems to care. The plot is mostly incoherent and the ending is so laughably silly I can't help but feel it was ironic or tongue-in-cheek - in complete contrast to the rest of the movie's stone-faced seriousness. I'd compare it to a really well-made music video - a lot of fun to look at, but completely devoid of depth. If you're willing to overlook that and take it as some kind of arthouse equivalent to a popcorn movie, there's a lot to hold one's interest. Didn't stop a good number of people in my theatre from walking out, but hey. It was still quite an experience.
