Disappointly Trying to Take On Kubrick's Masterpiece

Rating: 7/10 (4 December 2014)

Another Christological myth rendered in the form of science fiction but without the sophistication of Kubrick's masterpiece. The acting is marginal to good (these actors have all done better work) even if the visuals are impressive. Since they're mostly CGI and not practical effects, this is a movie that will always take a back seat to 2001. It's meant to have similar psychological effects but hasn't the intellectual presence to be even remotely as important either as a narrative or as cinema.
It's not a bad movie. It's actually a great movie that tries WAY too hard to be something more than the script's structure and devices will allow. If someone had shown me a treatment or outline for this movie, I would have said "Be prepared to write hundreds of drafts" because nobody wants to sit through a "2001 wanna-be".
Now I would recommend this movie to anyone who wants to enjoy a "space movie with some plot twists". If you can get past some of the exposition, even the sci-fi elements deliver something; just not the something that we haven't seen before in episodes of the Twilight Zone.
The poetry of Dylan Thomas is used so embarrassingly as a thematic device and tirelessly quoted to pull on the heart strings of the audience, that I am actually sickened by how unread the writer must consider them. We've all read that poem in high school... and we get the idea. Why beat it to death? There will be those who will watch this film and think it's brilliant but hopefully they will also be equally confused by their own unconscious disinterest because, honestly, as story-telling goes it's predictable to the well-viewed. There's a kind of unsettled quality to the psychological aspects of the film without the right tension, mystery, or even release.
What bothered me more than anything was the pseudo-intellectual musings on relativity theory and quantum mechanics and how they were woven into the psychical elements like some bad new age psycho-babble. The writer seemed to be treating the audience as if it hadn't read enough scientific material to distinguish that epistemological framework from a religious one. Frankly, that works for a mainstream audience but not for a hard core sci-fi audience.
I found myself, of course, watching the film and thinking "They're trying to make a 2001-esque movie here." It didn't work. For one thing, Kubrick's film is alchemical and embodies a mystical experience for the viewer him or herself that is based in depth psychology and structured in religious anthropology. This movie, on the other hand, is too mechanical as it tries to do something like that and it winds up leaving one feeling like "All is simulacra, so what's the point of even doing this?" It may seem unfair to make this comparison but it's the natural consequence of making this film so I won't apologize for making it.
I wasn't blown away by any of the actor's performances either with the exception of Mackenzie Foy, the girl who played "Murph". She delivered something stronger than the material.
Now, a lot of people will disagree with my review and that's because it is a good movie. I would recommend people watching it because it is entertaining but I'm not prepared to say it's an excellent film because I think that it tried from the script to the production to go somewhere that it didn't belong. Better than most of what we've seen this year but too ambitious and, for that reason alone, I've rated it accordingly.