Hostage

zvydavy-dotazer

score 1/10

"99 out of 100 people on IMDb disagree with THIS, you bad mean person! Your rating is way too harsh! This is a lovely light interstellar romantic comedy that's, like, loved by EVERY critic on Earth! Also, Chris Pratt, he's so dreamy with his sad puppy-bear expressions. Don't tell me YOU wouldn't sabotage a hot guy's pod and wake him up to keep you company for the rest of your life, just admit it, you hypocrite!"

When it comes to movies, I feel a special, top-shelf repulsion for the "people doing stupid things" trope which lurks in the dark with its loathsome slack- jawed cousins "This is a scary dark house/hall/corner but I am going inside anyway!" and "A scary serial killer is chasing us, gang - We should split up!" ready to jump up at you. My rating is merely a reflection of my displeasure with movies such as this one still using or having to primarily rely on the same cliches used over and over and not in any way is supposed to reflect the movie's cinematography, pacing, editing, settings, art direction, etc etc etc, because there is nothing wrong with the movie in this regard. Even the main Robinson Crusoe premise is delightful Existentialism 101 and I enjoyed it. Up until a certain point, that is.

Chris Pratt plays a mechanic with a shady past who's aboard an interstellar Titanic. When space ice (meteorite storm in this case) hits the ship, his hibernation pod malfunctions due to a temporary blackout. Only his, so he's the only person on the entire ship awakened early and there is another 90 years or so until destination arrival and allegedly there is no way to repair the pod on a ship with the most advanced tech equipment known to humanity. What are the odds! Now our mechanic takes it hard, as expected, and soon goes cuckoo from loneliness. Before you can say "Adam and Eve" he starts auditioning for the best Tarzan Impersonator Year 2150:
Interstellar Tarzan strand in space.
Interstellar Tarzan sad!
Interstellar Tarzan look at sleepy box thingy.
Interstellar Tarzan see future Mrs Tarzan.
Interstellar Tarzan happy Interstellar Tarzan not be alone any more!
Interstellar Tarzan genius!

You would expect from a sensible character in a sensible science fiction movie that instead of playing Biblical Adam in space, they would keep it in their pants and just wake up enough technician personnel to look at our WalMart Intersteallar Boats Inc Economy Class HiberPod(tm) malfunction and eventually better face the impending interstellar Titanic issue but I guess Morten Tyldum thought date rape-y deceptiveness (in Space (TM)) is a more fun topic to explore. Saving the ship? Boo! Building a mobile robot to send flirty notes to the person whose hibernation pod you deliberately sabotaged ensuring they will never see the new world ever? Yay!

"Do you trust me?" sayeth the dishonest rat. I wonder what would Ellen Ripley do? Probably watch Moon (2009) instead because it offers the juicy slice of existentialism without the gratuitous high sugar, trans fat-ladden, LDL-raising Biblical connotation icing and rotten, worm-infested Stockholm syndrome cherries.

zvydavy-dotazer 10 May 2018

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4160694/