The spaceship, Starship Avalon, in its 120-year voyage to a distant colony planet known as the "Homestead Colony" and transporting 5,259 people has a malfunction in two of its sleep chambers. As a result two hibernation pods open prematurely and the two people that awoke, Jim Preston (Chris Pratt) and Aurora Dunn (Jennifer Lawrence), are stranded on the spaceship, still 90 years from their destination.
Director: Morten Tyldum Music: Thomas Newman Actors: Jennifer Lawrence, Chris Pratt, Michael Sheen
So what are you guys expecting from this? I was excited when I heard about it. But that has been steadily subsiding. Right now, I just hope the story will hold up. Not too many cliches thrown in there.
Trailer was meh, I like Chris Pratt a lot in guardians, he just doesn't convince me in serious roles. He just has this permanent look, as if he is forcing himself not to burst out laughing.
I thought it was creepy. And given that it was apparently important to portray it that way as well, I don't understand why they told the viewer immediately that he had woken her. Could have been a great revelation/plot twist.
I also disliked the ending. The gap in the ship being there unnoticed for years, the one guy randomly waking up only to randomly die, the way the male had to redeem himself through self-sacrifice, and the unlikely manner in which the movie tried to convince us he was dead, when he was in fact alive. Also the bartender scenes were a bit odd. Ill ignore the 'sound in space' thingy.
The production was good and smooth. Nothing annoying like shaky camera or flash camera work or lens flares. The romance at some point was convincing to me, but it may not be to more romantically refined people. Maybe the acting was a bit stiff, but I usually judge that poorly. At the beginning, the plot holes/suspension of disbelief was fine, later on it became more problematic. But the setup of him roaming the ship, trying to find a solution kind of worked. But they didn't really continue on with that. It was obviously rather quickly that he gave up and/or there was no solution.
If they wanted to go with the creep-line, have a less good looking male actor. It doesn't seem to me, but apparently this Chris Pratt(?) is very good looking. Have him average or even below average. Then, have the viewer learn about it as Aurora learns about it. They are both awake, they get closer, they have some type of cute romance, and the audience can relate. Then both Aurora and the audience learn together what a creep he truly is. Then, instead of having a big problem putting 5000 at risk, have a smaller problem, where he tries to do something to redeem himself, but he dies, and she is now sad and alone. Open ending where it is unclear if she either does the same thing, or commits suicide.
Or, have it be more normal. Don't have him obsess over some woman he doesn't know, him somehow reading her diary as she still sleeps. Have him come up with a rational plan about who to wake up (apparently the plot wants to convince us the crew cannot be woken for some silly reason). Then a bunch of them are woken, still with the same ethical implications, but less creepy ones, and they fix the ship. And have some threat to the ship as a whole that isn't as silly as the core reactor being on fire for 1 year. Considering how fragile a spaceship going at .5 c is, it shouldn't be hard. It could be a 0.1 mm puncture and nothing else.
The ending and how he was dead, then alive, then dead, then alive, then dead then alive, was stupid. Either don't have him fake die, or keep him dead. How he magically survived a blast of plasma and how he magically came alive because she bypassed the security and then pressed all the autodoc buttons, that is just stupid and cringy. I bet they had him dead in the initial ending, but then the test audience responded negatively. A test audience always responds negatively to a sad ending because they literally ask them if they feel good having watched the movie 10 minutes after it ended. Why don't they ask them 1 week later what they thought about the ending instead? So many movies with crappy fake endings.
This felt like a huge missed opportunity, especially the ending. They could have shown a poignant montage of glimpses of what their lives were like spending all those years alone but together on the ship. But we got 5 seconds showing some trees and water. That was very disappointing.
Some alternate ending ideas I've read: - Jim dies keeping the door open. Aurora and the ship survive, but she, like Jim in the beginning, is slowly going insane alone. Eventually she wakes up someone else. End. - Aurora enters the autodoc. Jim wakes her up only once a year, on her birthday. So she is awake a few days per year and stays young. Jim ages, grows old and dies. She gets to go to the colony and then back to earth, as promised. - They alternate sleeping in the autodoc, thereby extending their lifespan just enough to reach Homestead 2.
Speaking of alternate ending, how about this ? They decide to grow old together on the ship, have a child and when their child is grown up, they put him in the autodoc to sleep. The child wakes up when arriving in Homestead 2 and first thing it gets is a diary about how his parents lived, grew old and died happily why watching over him/her.