My Rating: ★★

Star Abyss (星门深渊) is a Chinese sci-fi action movie that was released on 23 January 2024.

About

In the future a space craft takes 15 passengers to the “new world” through a star gate but gets caught in a worm hole type thing for a potential of 7 years. However, there is only room in the suspended animation chambers for 4 people and not enough food to last the full trip. There is also a vicious AI type monster aboard.

Cast

Gao Zhi Ting (高至霆) as Lu Ming
We are familiar with this actor from his support cast appearance in Yolk Man, I loved this show.

Andrew Lin (連凱) as The Captain
He is a Taiwanese actor, his face looks familiar but can’t tell if we’ve seen him in anything else.

Guo Mai Qian (郭迈谦) as Xing Tian
We’ve seen him in Ever Night Season Two but in this he plays a “bio-soldier”.

Review

The story was hard to pick up at first but as the film went on I realised there wasn’t much of one. There were plenty of opportunities to expand on the story, to make it more about the people on board, but that was a lost opportunity.

From what I gather they outsourced the outer space special effects to a company that has made US sci-fi related films. The monster special effect was ok, some scenes could have done better but it wasn’t too bad overall. When the alarm sounded on the ship it was just out of other Chinese films and TV shows that weren’t sci-fi, I guess it was cheaper than making a new one. A couple of the medical devices looked like a rehash flare from Chinese costume dramas.

The set wasn’t too bad either. You did think that it was on a space ship. Outer space was described as “in the sky” in the translation, not sure if that was a fluke of just the way that is described in China.

Some of the acting was a bit plastic, maybe this was down to the directing of the movie, they just didn’t get the most out of the actors.

I couldn’t help thinking that some things were a copy cat of US sci-fi.  For example, the Star Gate was right out of the show Stargate SG1, and the ship they almost collided with was called Enterprise.

Summary

I will give this a 2/5. It could have been so much better. It was kind of watchable, better than some but not by much.

Where To Watch

We saw this on the iQiyi app. It is on YouTube but some parts of it, I understand, the audio is missing maybe due to Google taking that part of it down.