A film for kids. PC ridden and cliché bound.

Rating: 2/10 (18 October 2015)

What is it about directors that they have to stoop to the very worst of clichés when making "space" films? I'm old enough to have seen "2001" when it first came out and it seems to me that far from emulating Kubrick's marvellous film Ridley Scott has regressed to some kind of Boy's Own adventure movies style - but peopled with every kind of PC cliché and dialogue that constantly sets this viewer's teeth on edge. Here's the scruffy ethnic that lives in a pile of mess but has worked out how to save the stranded astronaut - and develops his idea in the most childish way even though most of us had worked it out a good hour beforehand, Gruff Sean Bean growls and fights against the system. Pretty female astronauts are in control, a teenage NASA technician (female) spots something none of the more experienced men in real life would have noticed at the drop of a hat, the hideously white NASA director is stupid but the USA's new friends - the Chinese - come to the rescue. The scenes of jubilation in Times Square, Trafalgar Square and somewhere in China with massed crowds waiting with bated breath as the "live" rescue mission is beamed directly on to large screens is just pure nonsense. Pretty landscapes. Pity about the people, the dialogue, the plot and the suffocating PC-ness of it all.