Hal Goes Ape!

Rating: 6/10 (9 July 2017)

There is this titanic space ship carrying 5,000 hibernating passengers and crew on a 99-year journey from earth to a new planetary paradise. The nuclear-powered ship is run by a series of computers. Everyone is peacefully asleep, traveling through space at half the speed of light. So far, so good. Then -- well, think of it this way. Sometimes your computer develops idiopathic quirks and sometimes even crashes, doesn't it? Chris Pratt is waked up prematurely by a faulty chip or something, climbs out of his hibernation pod and finds himself all alone on a magnificently appointed but Listerianlly sterile space ship. Robots swirl around and serve him but the only robot he can speak to (and who can understand and reply) is the very human looking bartender, Arthur, who has the smooth, non-committal delivery of all good bartenders in first-class settings.
Pratt, a mechanic, explores the ship but there's nothing he can do to get back to sleep, nor can he discover what went wrong and woke him up. A year of debauchery sensibly follows. When he's not playing basketball and working out, he's drunk in the Mexican cantina moaning for "un autro cerveza." Arthur sympathizes but after all he's just a robot with a fluid line of reassurance. Pratt winds up unkempt -- dressed in sweaty rags, bearded, and with long hair, he resembles Robinson Crusoe. Who can blame him? Arthur is the only other sentient being aboard and he certainly doesn't give a damn what Pratt looks like.
Instead of shooting himself naked into outer space, Pratt learns how to wake up his fellow passenger, Jennifer Lawrence. It's a sound idea, except for the fact that now TWO of them will be stuck for 90 years aboard an otherwise empty vessel in space. Both will be dead long before the ship reaches its destination. What follows next is predictable. The romance has its ups and downs. The romance takes up about a third of the screen time and is followed by scenes in which the central computer, if there is one, goes ape. Frankly, some of the exposition lost me. The "gravity center" shuts down and everything floats into the air, and comes perilously close to drowning Lawrence. But inasmuch as the ship is spinning, centrifugal force should keep everyone's feet firmly planted anyway, shouldn't it? In any case, the last third of the movie raises the tempo to agitato with sirens going off, alarm bells ringing, instruments whose shivering needles are climbing towards the red zones, and all that sort of thing. Not to worry though. This ship is titanic but not THE "Titanic." The nuclear neurosis is only an excuse for an extravaganza of special effects.
The direction is unspectacular and for that, I think, we can all be grateful. The cameraman wasn't drunk. The production values are impressive even if the result lacks any poetry whatever. Pratt bears about as much resemblance to Patrick Swayze as Lawrence does to Reneé Zellwigger. As an actor, Pratt himself is neither here nor there, but Lawrence, her crossed eyes, and the throaty squeak in her voice, are endearing. Also her bosom, of which the director deprives us of even a glimpse. No wonder the world is going to hell in a handbasket.
I wish them well in their 60 or 70 years together. I hope their marriage doesn't turn into the hellish experiences my six or seven did. And I hope they practice safe sex and use condoms because, should Lawrence become preggers, they have no way of waking up the docs or even the midwife. And I hope boredom doesn't overwhelm them because, after all, Arthur is nothing more than a pair of metallic legs beneath his bartender's jacket.