It has the hammer, it just doesn't strike the anvil

stevennijman

score 4/10

Sam Worthington, whom we all know and like from Avatar, just can't seem to get enough of transforming to something different. He has a decent performance as Rick Janssen, a stoic and likeable soldier who was handpicked to be one of the first of the human species to travel to Titan, a moon orbiting Saturn.

The start of the movie is decent enough and presents the premise of the story well with decent anecdotes about how the earth has become unhabitable to humans. The last hail mary of earth is shown early in the movie and is, by movie standards, unique enough. Rather than creating an earth we can all live on, we simply try and bend nature's will by creating superhumans that are able to live on the much more unhabitable Titan. This begs the question why we don't change humans to be able to live on Earth though..

Whilst different from other similar sci-fi movies, I actually liked how the movie immediately jumped into energetic and exciting preparation of sending men into space. Whilst the idea was, in my eyes, very farfetched and unrealistic the movie did a great job in hiding its ludicrousness. Up to this point I was intrigued and was certain the part in space would make the movie much more interesting. I was especially looking forward to the arrival on Titan. Except.. that part never came.

The movie haphazardly tries to give a few scenes in which the soldiers are introduced, but it never really sticks. To be honest I can't remember any of their names. There are some attempts with Janssen's family to create a feeling of unease and trepidation, but that also doesn't really stick. At that point in the movie it still felt as a one-for-all, all-for-one idea. We, mankind, versus the unhabitable earth (of which we don't see much at the training facility, to be fair) and space.

Rather than fullfilling its promising start, the movie director seems to have changed his mind and quickly came up with an alternative scenario. One in which the antogonist is not the concept of space or the challenges of progress and evolution. No, the antogonist is quite simply a shady scientist, one who tries his best to spent billions on his, apparent, pseudo-science. It's a shame really.

The movie slowly dies off as it is unable to keep up with its own science and simply starts presenting 'sciency words' as fact. At some point, for which I would not be surprised to learn that it is the reason why the movie is so short, they simply start to kill off characters by the dozen to quickly follow through with the remainder of the story. I think the director realized at some point that they never thought of an answer to the question: 'why should anyone care?'. Don't even get me started about the pointlessness of the last scene, in which our stoic soldier can suddenly fly?!

There is much more to be said about the movie which I won't talk about, as this review is already too long. I guess Sam's acting is decent, Taylor Schilling does an okay job with the poor dialogue that was written.

Still really do not recommend.

stevennijman 30 March 2018

Reprint: https://www.imdb.com/review/rw4109911/