One star. Rated PG-13, and needlessly, for minor sensuality and fleeting profanity
By Derrick Bang
This film isn’t merely bad; it’s
impressively, defiantly awful.
The silliest TV soap operas
aren’t this eye-rollingly overwrought.
 |
| With Genesis corporate guards and lackeys hot on their heels, Gardner (Asa Butterfield) manages an improbable escape in a rickety crop-duster piloted by his newly introduced best friend, Tulsa (Britt Robertson). One has to wonder why an ancient biplane still would be used for such agricultural work, at a point in the future when space missions are hopping back and forth to Mars. |
The acting is wildly uneven. The
writing is dreadful. The direction is beyond clumsy. The use of music — and the
score itself — are thunderously flamboyant. The applications of science — this
is, after all, a futuristic adventure — are repeatedly, recognizably faulty.
I’ve never seen a film with such
a brazen display of grandiosity, as if every artificially portentous, laughably
embroidered line of dialog deserved to be chiseled as the 11th Commandment.
My mental warning klaxon began
shrieking 30 seconds into the very first scene: a press conference led by
Nathaniel Shepherd (Gary Oldman), founder of Genesis Space Technologies, who
intends to solve Earth’s many geological, climate-induced and socio-political
crises by establishing a human settlement on Mars. (As if spending gazillions
to eventually put a few dozen people on Mars would mitigate such issues?)
Oldman, in by far the worst
performance of his lengthy career, puts such pompous weight onto each syllable,
that I’d not have been surprised if a celestial choir had descended from the
heavens.
Shepherd introduces the
six-person crew, led by mission head Sarah Elliot (Janet Montgomery); they
field a few questions and then board the rocket that whisks them to the
orbiting Genesis Magellan-61 spacecraft, for their months-long journey to the
Red Planet.
Shortly into this trip, Sarah is
discovered to be pregnant.
We pause, for the first of many
reality checks:
Head of the mission, the
public-relations fate of an entire corporation on her shoulders, and Sarah imprudently
has unprotected sex shortly before she departs for Mars? Given that she’s the
only woman in the crew, that’s not merely narratively stupid; it’s a grossly
insulting and sexist contrivance on the part of scripters Allan Loeb, Stewart
Schill and Richard Barton Lewis. And it’s merely the first of countless,
groaningly awful plot hiccups.
Please, somebody: Take away their
keyboards before they commit writing again.
