Many talented people worked to make Cosmic Sin a reality, and almost none of them should be blamed for the smoldering wreckage that it most definitely is. The actors had a job and did it, the visual effects and craftspeople created faithful compelling visuals that set the mood. The writers, I just… I don’t even know what happened there.

The story begins 500 years in the future — a future that seems to actually be the year 2010, as told from the year 1987. There’s a few colonies, aliens show up, they need to be shot and blown up. There’s old people that can help, but don’t really want to, but they mostly do.

Cosmic Sin might actually be an attempt to write a script using only found phrases and sentences taken entirely from 80’s action movies and 90’s anime. If you lived during these times, and watched more than a few representative works, you will be intimately familiar with every character, every motivation, every set piece, every revelation. You’ve seen. Every. Single. Thing. in Cosmic Sin before. Only better.

The weary, reflexive cliches come fast and hard from every direction, sometimes stopping mid delivery, as if everyone understands that finishing them are both painful and unnecessary. The cast were given this verbal suicide mission, and largely made of it what they could. They should be commended, given counseling, and our support in this — their darkest hour.

That so very, very few people of color were harmed in the making of this movie is perhaps the only good news in this otherwise devastating production. 500 years in the future, humanity has expanded to several planets, but the world this movie shows is devastatingly white.

Ultimately, everyone involved in creating, editing, approving and otherwise enabling the script of Cosmic Sin has a lot of soul searching, acceptance, and redress to accomplish before their work in this world is done.