Set about 25 years in the future immediately following a vague apocalypse Clooney's character finds himself stationed at a stark frozen outpost -- my favorite thing in the film is the station's name, a Carpenter-ian flourish worth a smirk -- all on his lonesome. Except, hark Newt, he's not -- there's suddenly a mute little girl standing there. Cue the strings, and the strings, and the goddamned strings -- when Alexandre Desplat's soundtrack started plinking as the adorable little girl rolled some microwaved peas across the table I, for my sanity, had to check the hell out.
There are a couple of well-done set-pieces of the action sort -- what starts out as a rip-off of Gravity ends instead on a nicely underplayed note of tragedy, and there are scattered glimpses of cosmic brilliance in the film's expensively shot sheen. But my god I never cared. I never cared about the astronaut characters because they're never flesh-and-blood characters, and I never cared about the people on the ground because their scenes are so molasses-handed, thick with pushy melodrama, I skittered backwards in my seat as if shoved by a magnetic force.
1 comment:
The bit about Felicity Jones' single facial expression cracked me up. I've seen her in several projects now, and I think I've only ever seen her emote when she's asked to portray angst.
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