First boring, then unrealistic to absurd

stefan-morcov

score 5/10

The first half is incredibly boring. Nothing happens for half of the movie. I understand that we need to "feel" the loneliness. But there are so many good movies that portrayed the Robinson experience without being also boring. And then: completely unrealistic on each level, on each detail (maybe apart from the love story, which is cute and romantic). This is not supposed to be fantasy or adventure. It is supposed to be a pure-blood SF story, whose main character is a mechanical engineer. So I expect that at least most of the technical details should hold a little water, as well as the main story line. But no: every little technical/scientific/engineering detail is completely illogical, and the methods deployed by the main character to solve the situations are absurd. Look: my motorbike has, I believe, around 5 completely different methods to stop the engine in case of emergency (cut the contact, cut the electricity, cut the gas, put it into neutral etc); but a huge stellar ship has: NONE ? A huge stellar ship the size of a village (5270 inhabitants) has only 1 (one) bed in the infirmary ? No sensor detects for 2 years that there is an open hole in the hull of the ship, and loss of pressure in some rooms ?! There is no backup system for anything – instead they repeat "this system is supposed to be impossible to break, so this cannot happen" – gosh I don't remember any engineering 101 lesson to ever say this line, they all speak of redundancy, backup, fail-safe and fail-over mechanisms. The individual space costume resists the heat of a reactor that would otherwise break the hull of the whole spaceship ?! There is absolutely no method to alert the large sleeping crew of a huge ship that something went wrong ?! There is no alarm system on a huge space ship ? My car has a better information collecting system from various sensors than that space ship, you actually DON'T need to plug-in floppy-disks around your car to collect data, they kind of get collected automatically and displayed on the screen. And if something stops, you still have the history of what happened before, stored in some central memory chip. Airplanes today have 2 independent black boxes to store everything that happens on board, all information from all sensors, any sound etc; for a space ship they just forget about this. For a space ship I would actually add maybe 3 or 5 different independent backup storage devices, plus maybe 2 or 3 backup computing devices, stored in completely different physical locations, completely independent, each one able to resume operation automatically and instantly if another one fails and maybe other 1 or 2 of them manually. Also: an intelligent passenger decides to solve a complex problem himself alone, instead of waking up like the whole 250 engineering crew of the ship. OK, we all expect a couple of goofs in any standard reasonable SF movie, it is difficult to keep track of all details and even good movies miss things. But when you hear a stupid idea every couple of minutes for the entire half of the movie when something actually happens, then the movie is crap. Good pictures though, loved the graphical effects. And the final completely weird finale to put the cherry on top: what is one young loving beautiful heterosexual couple expected to do alone, their entire lifetime, on a spaceship with 5000 vacant seats available ?... I would have said "children". Well, guess what: they decided to just plant a lot of trees.

stefan-morcov 24 January 2017

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw3626269/