Dark Descent

Some twisted fiend in the belly of the Hollywood beast, likely sweating gin and fear, decided to dredge up the ghost of a 21-year-old Sean Connery space western and slap a new coat of paint on it, hoping no one would notice the rot underneath. They call this 2002 celluloid atrocity Dark Descent, but a more honest title would be Outland on the Cheap.The story is a familiar echo in the void: a lone lawman, this time played by a gum-chewing Dean Cain, policing a godforsaken mining colony sunk to the crushing depths of the Mariana Trench. Just like its space-bound predecessor, this underwater outpost is a pressure cooker of corruption, with a standard-issue evil corporation pushing its workers to the brink for profit.Our hero, Will Murdock, starts sniffing around a series of suspicious "suicides" among the miners, only to find himself in the crosshairs of the very company he’s sworn to serve. It’s a descent, alright, but not into darkness; it's a plunge into the stale dregs of a much better film.

The sheer audacity of the plagiarism is almost admirable in its depravity. Swap the vacuum of Jupiter's moon Io for the crushing black of the deep sea, and you have the same narrative skeleton. Outland was Peter Hyams’ grimy, blue-collar sci-fi take on the classic western High Noon, a tense standoff where a principled marshal is abandoned to face down hired guns.Dark Descent shamelessly lifts this framework, right down to the assassins arriving on a transport to silence the incorruptible cop who won't play ball. Where Connery’s Marshal O’Niel was a man of weary integrity, Cain’s Murdock is a caricature of tough-guy charm in a leaky submarine of a movie. They traded the stark, cratered landscapes of a distant moon for murky water and cheap CGI, leaving us with a film that’s not just an unofficial remake, but a soulless echo chamber, a cinematic ghost whispering tales of a time when Hollywood at least tried to hide its cinematic grave-robbing.