The story goes that Berton Pierce was working on miniatures for the movie The Grand Budapest Hotel when he got the idea of making a science fiction film using some of the best model makers in the business, artists who had created models for everything from Flash Gordon and Space 1999 to Moon and the Star Wars prequel trilogy.
This is the film Berton made — a lovingly made comedy set in a grungy, broken down, blue collar, outer space future where nothing works — and it has absolutely no CGI.
We have two bungling transport pilots, Spyre and Frug, who have clearly spent far too much time in space in their battered and barely functional ship — and far too much time alone with each other.
But this trip is different: the company wants them to take a secret, off-the-books cargo back to Earth and will pay them enough to retire.
Only the company insists on sending their own no-nonsense representative (who just happens to be an attractive young woman).
…Oh, and then there are those Canadian Russians who are out to kill them.
What could possible go wrong?
Perhaps Adventurados biggest surprise is that it was made in Berlin and that Pierce’s two bickering crewmen became Irish because he found two marvelous Irish actors, David Masterson and Stephen Patrick Hanna, to play his leads.
This is a lovely, witty, character driven comedy anchored by two great performances, a nicely low key script where mechanical failures, miss-programmed computers, threats from psychotic girlfriends, potentially poisoned Vodka, corporate spying and a cleaning robot running around waving a dirty pair of underwear are all just part of a day’s work.
What a film! as black-hearted and darkly cynical a comedy as you are likely to find and yet it is light-hearted and wryly funny. There are no heroic astronauts in sight, nor are we talking some triumphant and fluffy bit of Space Opera.
But then, Adventurados would never have dreamed of being any of those things anyway.
Best of all, Sci Fi London just posted it for free as part of their Isolation Version of their postponed Festival. After all, it was an Official Selection at the 2015 edition of the Festival.
And you have to admit it would be hard to find a better way to spend you time in quarantine than to watch a quirky German-made Irish road movie in Space.
rivets on the poster 