“Troubled” hardly seems like an adequate word to describe the production of Supernova.  Over $30 million over budget and put together by a revolving door of talent so lengthy that I could swear this started out as an Otto Preminger project sometime in the ‘70s, Supernova should have looked like a royal mish-mash of styles.

    It’s astonishing, then, that it doesn’t look like the cumulative work of several very talented directors with different goals.  Instead, it looks like the work of one supremely untalented film-school dropout who managed to blackmail a studio exec into greenlighting his insanely dumb little project with relatively “A” list stars.

    Stop me if you’ve heard this one before.  A group of people on an isolated spaceship answer a distress call from a great distance and it turns out to---Oh, okay, I’ll stop.

    But the difference this time is that it’s much dumber than the average Alien rip-off.  The distress signaling-creep (Peter Facinelli) turns out to be a power-mad human driven to new heights of insanity and strength by an alien object of 9th dimensional matter.  Why 9th dimensional?  Because, using classic Spinal Tap logic, it’s six more.

    The stars are the doctor and co-pilot (James Spader and Angela Bassett), who bicker for a while until they suddenly have chemistry. Also on board are a doctoring couple (Robin Tunney and Lou Diamond Phillips) who want to have a baby, a chess-playing computer whiz (Wilson Cruz) and Captain Robert Forster, who seems to have used his Oscar nomination to catapult himself from big roles in small, terrible movies to small roles in big, terrible movies.

    The talented cast (Hell, even Lou Diamond Phillips deserves better than this) is given nothing but awful dialogue to spout, ill-conceived action scenes to run through, and, for some reason, an emotional computer voice to trade wit with.  The plot twists range from predictable to downright groan-inducing.  The special effects are, admittedly, pretty good, but they still look like computer effects and never really connect fluidly with the ridiculously contrived plot.

    The DVD features deleted scenes that include an alternate ending (which is only slightly better than the “I-Can’t-Believe-Someone-Actually-Filmed-This” epilogue the film ended up with), but the advent of more technology can’t save a film as impressively awful as Supernova.