It's not that these actors can't act; I've seen several of them do great work in other roles. But here, they just seem to plod through most of their scenes, having to chew their way through dialogue that veers from corny to painfully expository. The writers and the director have to share about equal parts blame for this one.
Crises emerge that ought to be engaging and suspenseful, but they're so badly structured and dramatized that every moment just falls flat. Which brings me to the look of this production: The computer-generated backgrounds are just mediocre, hardly better than NASA-sponsored animations they commissioned to illustrate their missions almost five years ago. The spaceship interior sets are reasonably convincing, but the backgrounds for the transmissions from mission control look really cheesy.
There were also a couple of factual peculiarities: I'm not sure if I missed something, but five days into the mission, a relative complains about the inconvenience of having to send video e-mails, as opposed to being able to have a two-way conversation. Five days? They wouldn't be that far from Earth in five days. I can't imagine more than an eight- or 10-second delay in transmissions after five days--especially at the speed these guys are travelling. Every scenario for a manned Mars mission that I've read talks about a 6-month flight to Mars. These guys take almost a year, for some reason (a year in which, by the way, no one looks one iota different than when he or she started out).
The music sounds as if it was done by a guy with a synthesizer in his basement.
What a disappointment.
Crises emerge that ought to be engaging and suspenseful, but they're so badly structured and dramatized that every moment just falls flat. Which brings me to the look of this production: The computer-generated backgrounds are just mediocre, hardly better than NASA-sponsored animations they commissioned to illustrate their missions almost five years ago. The spaceship interior sets are reasonably convincing, but the backgrounds for the transmissions from mission control look really cheesy.
There were also a couple of factual peculiarities: I'm not sure if I missed something, but five days into the mission, a relative complains about the inconvenience of having to send video e-mails, as opposed to being able to have a two-way conversation. Five days? They wouldn't be that far from Earth in five days. I can't imagine more than an eight- or 10-second delay in transmissions after five days--especially at the speed these guys are travelling. Every scenario for a manned Mars mission that I've read talks about a 6-month flight to Mars. These guys take almost a year, for some reason (a year in which, by the way, no one looks one iota different than when he or she started out).
The music sounds as if it was done by a guy with a synthesizer in his basement.
What a disappointment.