B-Movie Inspirations: Deus, The Dark Sphere (2022)

Stumbled on this movie on Tubi. Saw that Claudia Black was in it (big fan!) and watched the trailer. It intrigued me. The style of the movie had a strong Alien crossed with 2001: Space Odyssey and I liked the dark tone. So I sat and watched it, not really thinking I would write about it but as I did, I began to see some messages as well as ideas in the movie.

The basic premise of the movie is that a mysterious black sphere is discovered in the orbit of Mars and a crew is sent to investigate it on board the ship – The Achilles. The ship is made of a central core ship with a massive ring spinning for gravity. However, they seem to spend a lot of time in the central core which seems to have gravity on it’s own, so I am not sure why they needed the spinning ring. The ship has an AI that controlled the ship while the crew slept – Miz.

The crew is made up of

• Karla Grey (Claudia Black) – the pilot with a tragic background where she lost her family in a car accident. This implies that she has given up all faith and does not believe in any deity.
• Ulph (David O’Hara) – a rough and tumble engineer who has a military background.
• Sen Paul (Richard Blackwood) – The captain and leader of the group that obviously has something to hide. He almost acts like a robot throughout the movie, like Ash in Alien.
• Sean Walsh (Charlie MacGechan) – Mission specialist that is part of the team that will study the sphere.
• Si Rubin (Branko Tomovic) – The Social Media specialist onboard, handling the vlogging and blogging of the journey.
• Tez Turreau (Crystal Yu) – Another crew technician that dies early in the movie – not sure her purpose.

The basic world building is established early on with flashback dreams Karla has. Earth is over-populated and dying. They need to find a new world to populate.

After this bedraggled six-person crew wake from eight months hibernation, we meet them all in their own element as they kick into their post-hibernation routines. The set design is pretty good for a low budget movie, from the sleep pods and engineering, to the bridge. We learn a few things as they do an initial scan of this massive sphere orbiting around Mars. The ship is being watched over their version of the internet, as apparently there is a lot at stake. The sponsor of this trip – I am not sure if it is a government entity or a corporate entity or both – has a lot invested in this and seem eager to find out what it is. Thus the social media specialist Si- who is looked upon as extra useless baggage by some of the crew.

I found it funny that the first two we meet is Karla and Si, both waking up from hibernation – which is sleep. It was Si’s first time, so what does Karla recommend to recover from the long sleep for a first timer? More sleep? What the heck??

Another point of interest is while they had to sleep the 8 month trip (giving the proper nod to the actual distances), communication signals still are instantaneous – even holographic communication. They communicate with their apparent boss – Vance (Phil Davis), who is presumably on Earth or on a station near Earth – via a holographic communication method that seems to overcome the 5 to 20 minutes normal radios waves take. And this also goes for the video feed that people back on Earth are watching.

While they did mention the blogging end of this mission, they did not play it up enough, I think. Making this a sort of reality show for the masses would have been a little more interesting but not sure if it would wrap well around the dark and mysterious side of things. However, it was a lost opportunity to really drive home the sheep mentality the masses, which really come to play at the end. They do, however, occasionally give you shots that appear to be from the angles of the onboard cameras they are watching from Earth, but they felt more like security cameras than reality TV cameras. And the Captain does use them to keep an eye on the crew – especially Karla.

They find the moon-sized Sphere (Yes, I know… that’s no moon) just where it was supposed to be and the initial scans show mothing. But the captain seems insistent that there is something there, and Karla had to find it. Eventually they discover that the Sphere is transmitting a single word in every Earth language ever known – Deus (God in Latin). Karla finds this odd – almost too easy to find.

There is a lot of intrigue and death that follows. The appearance of the sphere drives Si crazy and he kills Tez Turreau, then kills himself. Walsh dies on the first attempt at landing on the Sphere of what Ulph says is a space suit leak. They discover a strange gate-like structure on the Sphere that the Karla apparently gets near and sees strange visions. She then passes out. She awaken, finding that Walsh is dead and she is in the infirmary. The Captain Sen and Ulph seems to be way more interested in what she saw than anything else that happened. The vision she saw could only be characterized as Heaven but in the typical commercialized way. She saw her dead family and a golden city in the distance.

However, Karla is very skeptical of this whole thing and she smells a plot. It’s quite apparently by now that the Captain and maybe Ulph are in it somehow but you are not sure. Karla ends up investigating on her own while the others try to stop her. In the end is a pretty epic plot that is rather inspiring in it’s own right. Meanwhile, it is revealed that these gates are now popping up all over the Earth.

Between the Captain and Vance, they spill the beans when Karla threatens them with exposure to the masses. The Sphere and the Gate were all constructed by their benefactor as a ruse to make people believe they are a gateway to Heaven and that God has sent them, but instead they will kill all who goes into the Gates – something about a contained singularity and a painless death. They were constructed by some patented nano-tech long before the mission was sent out, as part of a plan to depopulate the planet. I think the number was somewhere near 30 billion. The planet is tapped out. Vance and his corporation hatched this plan to lure people into a his “Final Solution” to depopulate the planet.

To make things worse, the manipulated it down the Karla situation. They arranged the accident that killed her family – which also put Karla in the hospital – so they could implant her with a chip so she would see Heaven when she got close to the gate. Given her backstory, the masses would totally believe her when she said she saw Heaven.

So basically, the major crisis is overpopulation and the government turns to a mega corporation to make a cure for this crisis. The corporation as well as the government manipulated the narrative so the masses would believe this was a great cure for their woes. They used social media to manipulate the populous into believing this was Heaven – and they could have all their worries at rest, their diseases cured and see dead family again. I think there is a message somewhere in there…. I could be wrong.

From a RPG Game Master Perspective

It’s funny that I watched another movie about a corporate plot to depopulate the Earth. (See Parasite 1982). This one is farther in the future and has a little more advanced tech. Depopulating the Earth does not have to be the end game, although that is a good evil plot. The Sphere could be anything – an alien device of some kind or a corporate McGuffin. The Expanse has really done well with that kind of plot.

This was a brilliant little film with an interesting premise and a bleak ending. As for an RPG, there are a lot of tropes but also some modern approaches to those tropes.

• That wasn’t that way yesterday? A great initiation into an adventure is something in the local system suddenly appearing otr disappearing all of the sudden. Put this in the context of a low tech level near future setting and it could be fun.
• How would a futuristic reality show play out in space as a one shot?
• A mission to an alien artifact turns into a big commercial for a company product. How would that play out in an RPG?
• Setting up a character to be used as a “spoke person” for their product could be an interesting side plot for a character and set up a revenge side story for him or her later.