An good sci-fi flick with some excellent special effects.

jason-210

score 6/10

Note that this contains spoilers. If you haven't watched the film, I suggest you do before reading this.

The first hour or so of this film was fantastic. Just taking in the spacecraft with all its amazingly conceived features, was reminiscent of the first part of 2001: A Space Odyssey. It also struck me as being a realistic version of the type of spacecraft in Wall-E (think of the little cleaner droids, buzzing around, fixing things and cleaning the mess the characters make!) The premise of being alone on a vast, automated, self-repairing craft that is aware of your presence and provides all the conveniences you require, was an interesting concept. The technology and physics seemed plausible, cool, and realistic; and the special effects were restrained and effective. The robot bartender was fascinating, and provided some welcome entertainment.

For the first hour the story seemed meaningful and thought-provoking, but after that it began to fall apart. A major aspect of the plot during the first half of the movie was being unable to get to the crews' quarters to wake them up, and the hopelessness of the situation because of this.

Then, as if by magic, one of the crew wakes up, says there's something wrong with the ship, wanders around a bit, then dies. From then on it seemed to me like the script had been taken over by a different person, there to ensure the film served the public the usual smattering of sensationalist action scenes at expense of both the plot and plausibility of science. There is a brief promise of mystery as the trio realised there was something wrong with the ship and tried to figure out what it was, but this quickly evaporates as the problem turns out to be nothing more than a faulty nuclear reactor that is heading for self-destruction.

The obvious thing to have done here would have been to wake more of the crew, now that they had access, to see what could be done. However, we are told there is not time for that, so the protagonist miraculously fixes the nuclear reactor all by himself. What a genius! This involved finding and hot-swapping a replacement circuit board, getting blasted into space, being spectacularly rescued by his female companion, dying, and finally brought back to life by having about a dozen or so different resuscitation techniques applied to him at once by a machine! Yeah. Face palm.

jason-210 7 March 2017

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3655978/