‘Triangle’: Fun keeps its bearings

“The Triangle” (as in Bermuda), a three-part miniseries beginning tonight on the Sci Fi Channel, is the sort of picture I can readily recommend without really thinking it’s any good: It’s junk, but some elbow grease has been expended to make it shine.

It comes under the combined (for the first time) banner of producers Bryan Singer (“X-Men”) and Dean Devlin (“Independence Day”), which -- in line with the undying idea that when anyone from “the movies” gets involved in television it constitutes a favor to the medium -- makes this news. And not surprisingly, the series is, as a production qua production, consistently impressive, duly cinematic and persuasive in both its major and minor special effects, and really no dumber than “ID4.” (Volker Engel, who won an Oscar for that film, is the effects advisor here as well.) And you barely register that Cape Town, South Africa, is not actually Miami Beach, Fla.

It also sports a good B-list cast -- let’s say B+ -- including Eric Stoltz, Bruce Davison, Lou Diamond Phillips and Sam Neill. They form the film’s main asset, and if they are squandered on a lot of hooey, they are enjoyable enough company that the film remains watchable to the end.

Strange things are happening in the Sargasso Sea. Giant methane bubbles scuttle a rogue Japanese whaler, along with a Greenpeace craft captained by sole survivor Phillips, whose reality afterward becomes distressingly elastic. Meanwhile, shipping magnate Neill hires a group of oddly random “experts,” most of them in distress, to investigate the disappearance of several of his ships and the appearance, on another, of the body of a 15th century sailor.

Along with Stoltz’s tabloid journalist (a cynic and a skeptic, naturally, but expert in Triangle lore), the team includes Davison’s fading psychic; Michael Rodgers as a daredevil meteorologist, if such a thing may be imagined; and Catherine Bell (“JAG”) as a “deep ocean resource engineer” -- Googling that phrase fetches references only to this movie -- with a passel of degrees but a hole in her heart where her mother should be. You register their pain without feeling it very much.

That the story -- by the producers and “Farscape” creator Rockne S. O’Bannon, who also wrote the teleplay -- snakes around a lot, tossing supernatural red herrings in its wake, keeps it oddly compelling, even as it grows increasingly preposterous, not only as regards the supernatural but as to how people really act. It is the sort of picture where things happen because they have to happen to bridge plot points, and like a lot of sci-fi, it uses imaginary physics as a kind of deus ex machina. But when you are making up rules for the universe, it can behave, or misbehave, as is convenient.

The film is a hodge-podge. You may be reminded variously of “War Games,” the TV show “Sliders,” “Galaxy Quest” and “Moby-Dick,” while the notion of an untested explosive device whose triggering might rend the very fabric of space-time itself recalls real concerns of scientists on the Manhattan Project. (Indeed, there is a pair of scientists in a kind of Robert Oppenheimer-Edward Teller opposition.)

Charles Martin Smith brings welcome comic relief as a dissolute submarine captain. He’s gone too soon, but the rest do get along without him.

*

‘The Triangle’

Where: Sci Fi

When: 9 to 11 tonight, Tuesday and Wednesday

Ratings: TV-PG-LV (The show may be unsuitable for young children, with advisories for violence and coarse language.)

Eric Stoltz...Howard Thomas

Catherine Bell...Emily Patterson

Bruce Davison...Stan Lathem

Michael Rodgers...Bruce Geller

Lou Diamond Phillips...Meeno Paloma

Sam Neill...Eric Benirall

Executive producers Bryan Singer, Dean Devlin, Rockne S. O’Bannon. Director Craig R. Baxley.