I had high expectations for this film, as the scenario is an interesting one. Unfortunately, the film is clumsily structured and incoherent in parts, and many elements are contrived to keep the crew in danger. Here's a not quite comprehensive list:
In general, much of the film impressed me as contrived situations to keep the crew in danger. This movie had a lot of potential, but Danny Boyle chose to get lost in his own head.
- The movie opens with a voice-over explaining the situation and you jump right into the ship. Since there's no shots showing what is actually happening on Earth until the very end, I didn't feel invested in the mission.
- Any science that was once in the script has been gutted here - there's no mention of WHY the sun is dying or exactly how the bomb will restart it, although an interesting theory about a "Q-particle" infesting the sun is on the production blog.
- You'll be confused by some of the most incoherent fight scenes ever filmed. With his extreme closeups and quick cuts, Boyle can't even pull off a 20 second fight in a corridor without losing the audience. It gets worse with the Pinbacker character, who's filmed so blurry and artsy that my wife seriously thought he was some kind of trans-dimensional alien.
- For such a critical mission, the Icarus ships are not very robust. They contain only one airlock (even the shuttle has two ways to get out!), one mainframe that depends on a constant supply of coolant with no backup computer, and no emergency lighting. Instead of the habitat spinning to provide gravity (which would make more sense than the never-mentioned but apparent artificial gravity), the only part of the ship that spins are the communication antennas - the one part you want stationary and pointing to Earth. The heat shield is composed of thousands of mechanical louvers with no imaginable function, instead of a simple solid piece. I rarely had a clear idea as to where anything was in this ship; for example, the viewing room was cut into the bomb's heat shield, but there was no impression that anyone had to walk through the bomb area to get there.
- Oxygen levels play a big part in the suspense, with Michelle Yeoh calculating that there's only enough air for four crew. Yet this was a vast ship with literally cubic acres of air in the bomb area alone (which begs the question, why have air around the bomb at all?). And all this oxygen was generated by the small plant area? I don't think so.
- Why exactly did the first probe fail? Did everyone just decide to burn themselves up? Didn't quite catch that explanation.
- If the mainframe fails, there's only one person who can operate the bomb. Why weren't the rest of the crew trained to operate it? What else did they have to practice on for 16 months?
- The bomb will be traveling so fast space & time will break down? Please. This thing is the mass of Manhattan, you're not going to accelerate it very fast.
- Why was communication lost as they neared Mercury? We've had probes go to Mercury and even closer to the sun, and we've talked to them just fine.
- All remaining plausibility flees at the end, when Capa detonates the bomb and has a leisurely gaze at..what? The wall of nuclear flame? The fires of creation? You tell me. The famously cryptic 2001 made a lot more sense than this.
In general, much of the film impressed me as contrived situations to keep the crew in danger. This movie had a lot of potential, but Danny Boyle chose to get lost in his own head.