Space Odyssey - Voyage to the Planets might suggest some sort of connection to the inspired Kubrick movie, 2001: A Space Odyssey.

Forget it. This is, instead, a hokey 'voyage to the planets' mock-documentary that carries banality to new extra-terrestrial levels.

The premise is simple. Let's take info from the various robotic space explorations and probes of the last few decades, string all those facts together, dress up some actors in suits and pretend that instead of robots, these voyages were done by people, on a Grand Tour of our planetary system.

This mock-documentary is done with slow pretentiousness. And to show that this is 'reality', there's even the token death en-route. But the writing is routine, and the filming, done in Earth's deserts to simulate conditions on Mars and Venus, and done in an Ilyushin jet to simulate weightlessness, just doesn't cut the ice.

It all smacks of a high-school science-project mock-up. And in fact, I would think that lower forms at high-school, maybe Years 7 and 8, would be the only possible market for this mock-documentary. That age-group might pick up some worthwhile facts, while not being deterred by the overall corny amateurish feel of the program as a whole.

The transfer is high-quality anamorphic. But since the image quality is often purposely degraded to pretend to be documentary footage, the intrinsic quality is often wasted. Sound is basic stereo, and adequate to the task.

Extras include a 49-minute documentary, Robot Pioneers, which looks at some of the people behind past moon-walks and space-probes. One big goof -- after showing a Moon walk, the narrator mentions that Humans haven't set foot on another world now for more than 30 years. Well, the fact is that Humans have never set foot on another world. The moon is just a satellite.

There's a Making Of documentary, split into four parts, which looks at how actors were taught to simulate space travellers, how they learnt to simulate weightlessness, how the mock-spacecraft Pegasus was designed and built, and how desert landscapes in Chile became, for a time, sites on Mars and Venus.

Finally, there are Fact Files on the various mock landing crafts and other equipment used by our intrepid astronauts, and we close with the obligatory Photo Gallery of production pics -- clear snaps but very small.

The DVD cover lists the program as running for 191 minutes. The actual running time is 119 minutes.