Horrid Script

Rating: 4/10 (13 July 2017)

The film was utterly obnoxious to me. Some have forgiven it being a horror film, but I found this much worse than cheesy horror films which I find considerably more appealing.
For a start, the characters in this film are not bimbos and teenagers who party all the time. It's somewhat forgivable when characters like these do incredibly dumb things since they obviously aren't the best and brightest and might even be intoxicated/high. There's also often an element of camp to many of these horror films which makes seemingly shoddy writing and unbelievable decisions made by the characters somewhat charming, humorous, and acceptable.
When we have a serious film like this featuring elite astronauts and scientists who are obviously intended to be well-trained making incredibly dumb decisions repeatedly, it just comes off as unbelievably weak writing.
Another problem I find with this film is that it tries too hard to explain itself. This leads to two disparate problems:
1) Makes a lot of the film seem absurd. This is a problem I'm finding with a lot of sci-fi films made in the past decade or two. The writers obviously aren't scientists and they shouldn't need to be in order to create a decent science fiction story.
When things are left somewhat mysterious and unexplained, even science geeks will forgive the film as they did with far more ambitious concepts as found in Star Trek, Alien, Terminator, etc. However, when the writers get overzealous in trying to explain away the mystery as Phantom Menace did by trying to explain the Force through Midi-Chlorians, it can make even ordinary people roll their eyes at how lame, ridiculous, and unbelievable the film's concepts are.
In this sense, something that is left mysterious or even somewhat magical is far, far less absurd and far easier to digest than something which is given an absurd technical explanation. The writers of this film did not not appreciate the benefits of leaving things mysterious and, even without being a science geek, I found the film absurd on so many levels.
2) Kills a lot of the suspense. This film not only gets absurd trying to explain itself technically, but a lot of it follows a pattern with respect to the dilemmas the crew faces.
There is this pattern throughout the film where the crew encounter a dilemma and they have to explain it to the audience so that the audience understands the technical nature of the problem. Within minutes typically, another crew member comes up with a technical solution to the problem.
This is to be expected to a great degree in a sci-fi but where the film kills a lot of potential for suspense is that most of the dilemmas only last minutes until the dilemma wanders off to a new section of the ship (sometimes literally) creating a whole new dilemma.
As a result, a lot of the film is just dilemma followed by explanation of the dilemma followed by a brainstorm for the solution to the dilemma and, within minutes, a whole new dilemma and a repeat of the previous pattern. All of this explanation in between doesn't allow the film to linger on one dilemma and build up a lot of tension and suspense and drama as can typically be found in even mediocre horrors and thrillers.
Overall I found this film to fall completely flat. Some were able to forgive the script. I couldn't get past it and just found the film incredibly bland and obnoxious in ways that had me cursing the writers of the film.