Even with various weaknesses, offers up a refreshing focus on new dazzling images

Rating: 8/10 (28 January 2019)

This mystery monster thriller is visually daring in its set design and goes a fair amount towards exploring the more substantive mental gyrations of hard core science fiction. Even with its various weaknesses, this movie's offers up a refreshing focus on new dazzling images such as evoked in Avatar (2009) ground breaking look and patience in providing screen time for cognitive and emotional insight into humanity as explored in Arrival (2016).
The flaws uncovered in this movie include the minor omission of the likely absence of recording keeping even with the field explorers experiencing apparent amnesia, the exploratory team's surprising lack of team camaraderie for such a venture, surprising weapons ability among all specialists on the team, the allowance for only one person to go on a rescue mission, and the introduction of apparent divergent specialists on the exploratory team and their under-utilized presentation of their different skills. A better presentation of more realistic team building can be found in the sci fi television series Defying Gravity, 2009 and Michael Crichton's Sphere (1998). The strange creatures that inhabit this movie can be found in a compilation of other movies that in some ways are even more imposing and threatening as depicted in the 2005 sci fi television series Threshold, John Carpenter's The Thing (1982) as well as Ghosts of Mars (2001), Serenity (2005), The Devil's Tomb (2009), Phantoms (1998), and Epoch (2001). The creative and captivating set design and the eerie alien environment has echoes of elements found in Solaris (1972, 2002) and Lost in Space (1998). The ultimate reveal loses some of the power of the feminine presence on screen as the movie seems to fall back into the macho stereotype and the resort to power, panic, and destruction instead of the more relational connection to curiosity and hopefulness as suggested in Alien: Resurrection (1997) and Star Trek: The Motion Picture (1979) or even the fascinating progressive evolution as typified in Oblivion (2013) and Moon (2009). For a different type of as sustained creepiness of another kind come in the form of Under The Skin (2013) and Nomads (1986).