A six-man team of astronauts travel to Jupiter's moon Europa to discover if a pocket of water beneath the ice's surface contains life.
Imagine if you will, watching forty-five minutes of the NASA channel, then a briefly exciting found-footage home movie, more NASA channel, and then finally about twenty minutes of the film "The Abyss". That's what watching this film was like. I nearly dozed off at one point.
They manage to blend in two film-making techniques I despise in the first fifteen minutes... news clips to tell the story, and what I call the "fourteen hours earlier" shortcut. If you have to show some kind of major excitement at the beginning, then flashback to the setup to tell your story and hook your audience, then you are a lazy, lazy writer. You can't make the story compelling telling it from beginning to end? Find another line of work, or find a job writing where you get more time to edit and refine.
The acting was fine, the story was fine, but the presentation made it dull.
I laughed out loud once when they had a clip of scientist Neil deGrasse Tyson saying he wanted to go diving under the ice on Europa and see what "swam up and licked the camera lens". One holy crap moment when an unsecured astronaut fell the length of the ship to their death. Otherwise it was long stretches of boredom punctuated by brief moments of action or terror.
As a maker's movie, it's excellent to craft to, but I don't know if it will occupy your mind while you work. Maybe while working a complex lace pattern, so long as the occasional numbers shouted on the screen won't mess up your stitch counts.
I gave this a two out of five stars. Had it been presented a little less drily, I might have been able to get behind it. In its current state, I'd rather recommend "The Abyss" and have a bit more fun.
No comments:
Post a Comment