MOON 44 (1990) – ’Another Alien Clone’

MOON 44 – directed by Roland Emmerich

Starring: Michael Paré, Lisa Eichhorn, Malcolm McDowell, Dean Devlin, Brian Thompson, Stephen Geoffreys, Mechmed Yilmaz, Leon Rippy, Roscoe Lee Browne

In the outer zone… you need a friend

Year 2038: The mineral resources of the earth are drained, in space there are fights for the last deposits on other planets and satellites. This is the situation when one of the bigger mining corporations has lost all but one mineral moons and many of their fully automatic mining robots are disappearing on their flight home.

In fact, multinational companies have supplanted traditional nation states and like nations of old they too wage physical war against each other. One such company has been prey to a rival’s company’s attacks and, deciding that it is all an inside job, sends an undercover investigator (Paré) to "Moon 44" – probably the rival company’s next target.

Nothing original here. Nor come to think of it, anywhere else. The movie’s visual sense borrows heavily from mostly James Cameron’s 1986 Aliens and, of course, Blade Runner. Although the film was obviously done on smallish budget, director Emmerich has to be commended on doing a respectable job on the sprawling sets and special effects.

From the comment section:

‘This movie feels like Roland Emmerich cut all the padlocks on the doors of the Aliens set and filmed his own movie while no one was around.’

’Everyone starts somewhere, tent pole helmer Roland Emmerich shot this sci-fi flick in Germany in 1990; starring now mega-producer Dean Devlin. With production design and cinematography nicked from ALIEN and BLADE RUNNER one would naturally assume MOON 44 to be another ALIEN clone. While aesthetically true (copying the iconic looks very well) Emmerich makes an action picture vs horror.’

’A pretty standard and enjoyable sci-fi action with space helicopters and the usual evil company.’

’Visually, it looks like an unofficial sequel to "Alien" and "Blade Runner" but otherwise feels like an FMV game from the early 1990s. It can be enjoyable though, in a bad B-movie kind of way.’

’Outland + Blade Runner + Blue Thunder (sort of) = Moon 44! Not bad. Kind of a B-movie level script, with a lot of cliches, but it looks really good, with great cinematography from Karl Walter Lindenlaub.’

’Probably the biggest missed opportunity of the 90's. Lighting, art direction, music, charm ALL SO GOOD. Total brutalist industrial sets. Script and story are actually f…..g dreadful.’

Taken from:

http://www.scifimoviepage.com/moon44.html

and

https://letterboxd.com/film/moon-44/