sci-fi is dead

Rating: 1/10 (12 May 2015)

No, not because of this god awful movie. Sometimes, turkeys like this will be shot, it's the nature of movie-making, but it's inconceivable to me how such a turkey garners such high ratings, unless we realize that the public in general has become sci-fi illiterate in particular and movie illiterate in general, as a result of years of being subjected to sappy Bollywood story lines mixed with cheap cgi and pretty faces being passed on as sci-fi. That's why sci-fi is dead - the audience has been lobotomized.
It's difficult to criticize this turkey. Where does one start? The premise? That a crop blight, out of all possible end-of-the-world scenarios, is being sold as a reason to abandon our planet? Really? What kind of a planet does one expect to find that is BETTER than the current one EVEN with the worst imaginable or unimaginable crop blight? And the only apparent/conveyed consequence of this blight is DUST, and the grand conspiracy of rewriting moon landing history as faked? Yeah, that makes total sense - farmers need to be told moon landing is faked, or else they would not plant corn.
And as always, when our unwilling hero stumbles into a top secret operation, he is welcomed with open arms without so much as a how do you do, and trusted into the driver's seat, which, for some reason, nobody thought of filling during the whole planning phase.
I won't go into the details of such random, nonsensical behaviour and motives of characters, or the absurdity of alleged "science", such as controlling a second hand in a mechanical watch with gravity, or the sappiness of using "love" as an explanation for breaking all laws of physics as we know it. Speaking of the much vaunted physics, was that the one line of grade school level descriptions of a black hole and relativity by the otherwise useless character transparently transplanted merely for racial diversity?
For to even land a proper criticism, one has to start from a solid foundation in order to identify where something goes south. For this drawn out garbage, I cannot think of a single solid foundation. Even the "inspiration" from Rama and Contact have been so bungled that it doesn't impart any redeeming quality.