Putting the awe back into awful movies

Rating: 3/10 (1 March 2017)

Nobody does garbage like Hollywood. Except maybe Bollywood. Anyway, this film has Chris Pratt in it, so if you are not expecting plot holes large enough to fly interstellar spacecraft through, lower your expectations and leave your brain at the door when you go to see this film.
On the plus side, the sfx are great. The craft looks real inside and out. The ship design doesn't really make sense but the filmmakers don't bother explaining anything anyway. So this isn't really science fiction, it is just fiction which happens to occur in space.
As for spoilers, if you saw the trailer or the actors doing the rounds of the talk shows you knew that more than one person appears in this film. The protagonists, played by Pratt and Lawrence are on a ship with 5000 others heading to a distant planet. They are meant to hibernate for 120 odd years for the journey, but something goes wrong and they wake up.
What happens next is where the hint of originality evaporates from this film. Basically from the moment Lawrence appears on screen, you can predict almost every event that is to come. The only exception is the appearance of Laurence Fishburne, but oh dear the protagonists forget to ask him how to wake up the crew and are left on their own to deal with the "drama" in the most clichéd ways the scriptwriters could imagine. This is Hollywood at its most self indulgent, the manufactured drama being so predictable it is just boring. The final act is supposed to be suspenseful but we have seen this kind of paint by numbers cinema before.
So, if you are like the protagonists and have just spent 120 years in hibernation, this film will be a thrilling experience filled with exciting twists and suspenseful turns. For anybody with the desire to not have their intelligence insulted this is just another big budget low effort mountain of crap that you can avoid and miss out on nothing.