Boring - if this is mankind, why save it?

Rating: 1/10 (23 January 2015)

When I watch a movie, I want to be drawn in, care about the people and their problems, feel the urgency of the situation, experience the awe when exploring new worlds. This movie did not do the for me.
I really could not relate to the characters. I did not care what happened to them, how they felt, what they had to go through. None of them seemed very likable either. The father (a redneck with a southern drawl – that strangely disappeared during the movie) did not seem to care a lot about his children. The son grew up to be an asshole who did not seem to care about his wife (a submissive domestic drudge who seemed to be afraid of her husband) and child. And the daughter, Murph, never got over the fact that her father left her to save the world (no less!) and was totally messed up. One moment you see the son and daughter as children, the next time you see them they are grown-ups, at least 25 years older and you do not have a clue what happened to them in between. And quite frankly, you do not give a damn either.
The situation: planet Earth is dying and the few people left, are farmers now. Do we see anything of our dying planet? No. Just a farmhouse in a dusty cornfield in the middle of Mid-West Nowhere. Does it look ominous? Not in the least. Does it look like a disaster waiting around the corner? No. All the rednecks still seem to be driving their enormous gas-guzzlers (where do they get the fuel from?) and they do not seem to bother about the world, let alone doing noticeable effort to find a solution. So does it look like a problem that urgently need to be solved. Not really.
But wait, dad has dashed off in a space ship to find another world, so probably they spent decades of their time watching the sky for him to return with the good news, rather than assuming that he maybe never will come back and that it maybe would be a good idea to see if they in the mean time could find some solution. But no. They all wait for our hero to come back through the black hole to tell them that there is a paradise waiting at the other side of the hole.
Daddy in the mean time, spends his days with two colleagues that he does not really like, exploring outer space. And guess what, after a refreshing 2-year nap, they go through the hole and what do they find? Water World and Ice Age. Really? This is the best they could come up with? Is it stunning? No, I have seen water and ice before.
Well, to cut a (very) long story short, after exploring those worlds daddy jumps in the black hole and guess what? He tumbles right into his old house in the cornfields and lands behind the bookshelves in his daughter's bedroom. It all looks like a bad LSD-trip. But somehow he manages to manipulate the hands of a watch, and his daughter immediately understands that that is a message from her father and saves the world.
The whole story is wrapped up with some sentiment and our hero flies off to the woman he never liked, but who now suddenly seem to be the love of his life. The end.
This all is laced with pseudo-scientific gibberish and endless, endless, endless scenes about people in a spaceship arguing and people in the farmhouse in the dusty cornfield arguing.
If a gigantic meteor would have fallen out of the sky and would have destroyed that farmhouse and that darn dusty cornfield to begin with, I could have spent the remaining 3 hours to something more useful. And I couldn't have cared less.