Legion
Alien meets The Dirty Dozen in this Sci-Fi Channel original
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Review by
Jeff Berkwits
It's 2036, and the Allied army is fighting an apocalyptic war that has recently spread beyond the Earth's surface to the Industrial Space Colonies. After six years of ferocious battle, the opposing forces have reached a bloody stalemate, leading the Joint Forces Council to decide that a new, unorthodox method of combat is needed to win the conflict.
To that end, Colonel Flemming (Troy Donahue) heads an innovative project to recruit a ragtag band of military prisoners and turn them into an elite demolition team. This questionable bunch includes a hacker, a nymphomaniac, a renegade doctor, a rapist, and assorted deserters, thieves and thugs. Under the leadership of Major Agatha Doyle (Farrell), a disgraced officer who inadvertently caused the deaths of an entire squad, the 10 members of the group venture out on a suicide mission to destroy an enemy fuel processing plant located on a desolate, windswept world.
The unit expects to meet fierce resistance, but upon landing discovers that the building is deserted. As the soldiers fan out to complete their mission, one by one they are mysteriously murdered. With hours to go before a rescue team arrives, the steadily dwindling crew races to discover whether they've got a killer in their midst or if they are being stalked by some unknown creature.
A ragtag band of fugitive actors
While there's almost no character or scene that is genuinely original in this flick, watching so many familiar faces shamelessly emote is surprisingly enjoyable. Doyle's ever-present scowl is unintentionally hilarious, and observing the sweat-drenched, spectacled visage of Private Siegal (Feldman) as he simultaneously struggles to descramble a coded message and control his fear is similarly amusing.
Captain Aldrich (Stevenson), a decorated war hero imprisoned for desertion, is the ostensible star of this production, serving as both the group's voice of reason and as counterpoint to Doyle's no-nonsense leadership style. This assignment has saved him from certain execution, and his haggard appearance is moderately convincing and believable, belying a strong mind that slowly but surely determines what is actually occurring on the mission.
The team itself is a standard-issue military crew--an accomplished pilot, a special forces operative, a demolition expert, etc.--and although each (with the exception of Doyle) is known only by his or her last name, they all manage to elicit appropriate levels of sympathy or, as necessary, revulsion, from the audience. The derivative adventure essentially mixes the scenario of Alien with the setup of The Dirty Dozen. Legion never comes close to approaching the excellence or excitement of either motion picture, but it does serve as reasonably effective escapist entertainment.
This is one of those so-bad-its-good films that doesn't quite keep you on the edge of your seat but still manages to hold your attention. Corey Feldman fans should definitely tune in, if only to catch a brief but droll reference to his famous role as Edgar Frog in The Lost Boys. -- Jeff
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