2016 sci-fi romance
Rating: 11/20
Plot: When a sleep chamber on a ship traveling to a distant planet wakes up Chris Pratt 90 years early, he's faced with a difficult decision: 1) Spend the rest of his days, lonely and masturbating while hurtling through space or 2) Waking up the hot chick and hoping she's into guys who look like Chris Pratt. He chooses the latter, but what will happen if she finds out?
Just what the world needs--a glossy sci-fi movie that seems to be a thinly-veiled metaphor glorifying rape. It's entirely possible that I'm reading too much into things.
There are elements that I enjoyed about this movie. Individual pieces were really good. I liked Pratt a lot, mostly in the beginning when he doesn't have much to do. The special effects were really good. Michael Sheen's android bartender was a fun character.
But those pieces don't really add up to anything, and the bads far outweigh the goods. I'm not sure what the message of this movie is; the romance never feels like anything real, just a necessity to appease horny 30-somethings; characters' poor decisions have no repercussions; sequences start feeling redundant; and it's a science-fiction romance movie. By the time Laurence Fishburne pops in to play the exact character you'd expect him to play, I was already pretty bored. That's the exact time the movie shifts and attempts to become something else, and that something else feels malnourished and doesn't work either.
What this attempts to do is combine spaceships and romance with a pair of young stars to be some sort of perfect date movie. Unfortunately for director Morten Tyldum in his follow-up to Imitation Game and writer Jon Spaihts, the guy who also wrote Doctor Strange and Promentheus, it doesn't work as a spaceship movie or a romance. It's just Pratt and Lawrence playing spaceship for a couple hours and winding up with nothing to think about, nothing to learn, and more than likely nothing to remember.
Unless those guys were happy settling for "almost enjoyable." If that's the case, congratulations, guys. You managed to make a movie that was almost enjoyable. An almost enjoyable rape movie.
I'm with ya on the first part. The whole man-on-an-island feeling could have been all it took to make this an interesting movie. I thought it was gutsy, though, to have him wake her up instead of her accidentally waking up...who knows, maybe in the director's cut, it shows how he wanted to fuck Lawrence Fishburn, too.
ReplyDeleteA much better twist: It's revealed that Laurence Fishburne woke up Chris Pratt because he was horny.
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