Independent, no-budget cinema is always a gamble. You never really know what you are going to get. Sometimes you get a great story from a creative staff that has vision, and what they lack in money they more than make up for in energy and effort. More often than not, however, what you get can scarcely be called a film; it is something that may have vision, but the execution is so bad as to make it nearly unwatchable. Now, where does Planetfall, uh, fall? Definitely somewhere in between, but with strong leanings towards the unwatchable.

The story is centered in the space western genre that has been mined by the likes of Firefly and Oblivion, and clearly inspired by the likes of Star Wars and Sergio Leone's spaghetti westerns. However, as enjoyable as the premise is, it is sunk by bad dialogue, bad acting, and poor effects — only the last of which is a forgivable sin. I can overlook poor effects if the overall story can convince me to believe in them — there has to be an energy, the film has to sell the look, and this doesn't quite do it, though I cannot truly fault a no-budget film for having bad effects. They tried and for the most part succeeded at accomplishing what they set out to do. Now if the dialogue and acting had been better, this may have been a different story.

The setting is a planet that has been torn apart by civil war. The war is being waged between those with psychic abilities and those without, and at the center is a drug which enables or enhances those psychic abilities. Now the final shipment of that drug has crashed in the wastelands of the planet. A number of different groups are heading out to the wastelands to find said shipment of drug.

First there is a bounty hunter named Lux, who teams up with an old partner/lover, not because she wants to, but because she needs the money this could bring her. Then there is Wendy, a roguish bounty hunter who is currently running a scam with a wanted felon, but when word of this drug hits her radar, she enters the hunt. Lastly, there is a group of psychic mercenaries that desperately want to find the shipment. Everyone involved has secrets and other desires surrounding the search, but the script is poorly developed and I really had no idea what any of them were really trying to do.

The movie runs 90 minutes, but feels more like three hours. The acting is so completely bland that I could not find any interest in the characters' stories. Each one moved along their path, getting closer and closer to their goal, all as I cared less and less. The bland acting and the dialogue were more than enough to cancel out my brain's desire to figure out what was going on, nothing seemed all that interesting. At times it was a struggle to keep focused, with much of my viewing time spent wandering around the scene, looking at the effects rather than the story, and I do not feel that I really missed much.