Want to watch a man fidget in a chair and hyperventilate for an hour? Then this is the movie for you.
It's possible to make a compelling movie about a single person alone in a tense situation. All is Lost (2013) follows a lone sailor on a sinking sailboat. Locke (2013) is just Tom Hardy talking on the phone in his car. This film obviously wants to be a claustrophobic thriller in that vein. But it simply doesn't know how to build tension.
The low budget forgives some of the unconvincing effects (they can't afford to show objects floating in zero g, so they just never show Taylor let go of anything). But the real weakness is the writing. Taylor never seems like a real, sympathetic character. The movie tries to explain his erratic behavior by saying he's hypoxic. But we have no baseline to compare it to. He's disoriented and agitated from the word go. So we have no sense of whether he's losing it due to lack of oxygen, or if he's just inept.
The ending is supposed to be a shocking twist, but it just feels like a cop out. The movie forces us to spend over an hour in a cramped space with a single character, then kills him off screen and explains what happened in some stilted expository dialogue from a character we've never seen before.
And finally, I'm sure most sensible people know this, but the British didn't actually put a man in space in 1959. Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go into space, in 1961.
It's possible to make a compelling movie about a single person alone in a tense situation. All is Lost (2013) follows a lone sailor on a sinking sailboat. Locke (2013) is just Tom Hardy talking on the phone in his car. This film obviously wants to be a claustrophobic thriller in that vein. But it simply doesn't know how to build tension.
The low budget forgives some of the unconvincing effects (they can't afford to show objects floating in zero g, so they just never show Taylor let go of anything). But the real weakness is the writing. Taylor never seems like a real, sympathetic character. The movie tries to explain his erratic behavior by saying he's hypoxic. But we have no baseline to compare it to. He's disoriented and agitated from the word go. So we have no sense of whether he's losing it due to lack of oxygen, or if he's just inept.
The ending is supposed to be a shocking twist, but it just feels like a cop out. The movie forces us to spend over an hour in a cramped space with a single character, then kills him off screen and explains what happened in some stilted expository dialogue from a character we've never seen before.
And finally, I'm sure most sensible people know this, but the British didn't actually put a man in space in 1959. Yuri Gagarin was the first human to go into space, in 1961.