I hate to be confounded by my own prejudices (who doesn’t?), but sometimes you inescapably must give credit to where credit is due. Most of us are selective about the movies we view, according to their genre, so it is intellectually invigorating when the boundary-hoppers come along. Though some sequences take place in what look like nothing more than regurgitated, overblown TV sets, what is genuinely likeable about Morten Tyldum’s film, overriding its predictable pastiche and unoriginal design, is the engaging boy-meets-girl story (the oldest in the world) involving Jim and Aurora (Chris Pratt and Jennifer Lawrence). They are among 5,000 passengers on board one of those giant Spielberg-ish spacecraft, travelling in slo-mo at half the speed of light to an outpost established by the Homestead Corporation a long way from planet Earth. Everybody on board, including the crew and all of the new colonists, is in an induced coma, but a malfunction awakens Jim ninety years too soon. He is totally alone, except for his companionship with an android bartender, Arthur (Michael Sheen – a bizarre but reassuring casting). If you had the ability to open one other sleeper’s cocoon, to be your partner in condemned solitude, would you do it? Would you indulge in an act so selfish? Or does the drowning man instinctively take another down with him? This is the crux of the matter. What is original about the movie – apart from its underpinning moral question, to which it takes the tried and true ‘I love you‘ escape route – is that there are no spider-legged aliens against whom Jim and Aurora are fighting. The enemy is technology, before which we all now cower. When their precise, computerised life-journey through space starts to go pear-shaped, what is there to revert to? One glitch after another puts the entire project at risk and Jim and Aurora must work together to save the day. The soundtrack gets ear-splittingly louder and louder as the crises unfold, but if you can cope with that the brain cells will be keenly activated.
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