A fairy tale about global warming

Rating: 10/10 (29 December 2016)

Contrary to popular belief this movie isn't a sci-fi or a thriller/drama about the psychological strains and moral dilemmas one would have to face and endure on a century long space voyage or anything else people try to label it as.
This movie is a fairy tale. It uses the classic tropes of fairy tales: a minimal set of characters isolated from the world, boy and girl as protagonists and an antagonist which in this case is the setting itself. Boy and girl fall in love, not as a main point of the story but as a story telling tool. You see, the prime directive of all living things (including humans) is to ensure the continuation of their own individual existence, which translates into procreation which through our specie's evolution got reinforced with associated emotions, as in we crave and enjoy contact with our significant other, we experience love. Love then is a shorthand for survival, so storywise you can say 'whatever you do for love, you do essentially to survive which means it's absolutely necessary and morally right.' The happy ending means that the lovers have succeeded, therefor their actions serve as a practical example to what you (the viewer) should do in a similar situation. So the morale of the story is in their actions: under such and such circumstances these actions and/or mindset will be the most beneficial to you.
*** SPOILERS ***
The morale of this movie is conveyed through three key dialogues. Arthur telling Jim to accept his life, his present and make the best of it instead of wishing for some unobtainable future. Jim telling Aurora during her interview that 'back on Earth, if something broke they didn't fix it, rather replace it' (kinda like all of them leaving Earth for Homestead 2 (hint-hint)). Gus tracking the system failures, showing the hologram time line and stating that all the problems and prognosed demise of the ship can be traced back to one underlying fault.
The warning of the story is this: our (westers culture and fast advancing developing countries) materialist obsession with chasing future fulfillment leaves us blind to our present, which in turn makes us unsatisfied and unappreciative of what we have, which in turn makes us neglectful of our duty to preserve what we have, which ultimately makes us extremely irresponsible with our own lives.
The story goes like this: Jim focusing on the present endulges himself for a year but realizes that the opulence and luxury of the ship that is our modern civilization is not enough to satisfy his most fundamental needs as a human being. He seeks companionship, it works, they fall in love, then their love get's tested, their existence is threatened by the failures of the ship. Avalon is a metaphor for spaceship Earth, the malfunction is global warming, the cascade of problems is all the symptoms and side effects of it that we experience. The big tension at the end is the climate catastrophe we are heading towards.
The morale is twofold: seek human connection instead of material goods. Take care of your environment, more specifically the planet Earth. The ending scene is a reinforcement of this, meaning: our true home is the natural ecosystem that we evolved in and which sustains us, not the gleaming metal halls of our technology filled civilization.
The movie itself is a sneaky wake up call to adult western viewers. The choice of fairy-tale-esque story telling is a powerful critique of said viewer audience's mental acumen from the writer and director. The critics' dismissal of this movie is a sad validation of the creators' base assumption about the viewers.
The subplots of the waking up of Aurora with all of the decision's moral issues, the resolution of their seemingly irresolvable conflict are explored just enough to signal the audience, this movie is for adults and the director and writer are aware of these obvious implications and are not trying to sell cheap eye-candy. But are not further developed precisely because they are not this movie's focus and that's where people get off track and misread this whole movie.
tl;dr: If it looks like a duck and sounds like a duck, it's probably a duck. But if the audience is trained to see cats and dogs they'll find a quacking, wobbling, feathered creature to be a f**k ugly dog instead of seeing it for what it is, which is a duck.
All in all, great movie! I recommend you watch it and tell your friends and family about it.