Review of 400 Days

400 Days (2015)
3/10
Oh god, why did you choose that ending?
1 November 2015
Warning: Spoilers
So 400 days is about 4 "astronauts" who are going to be put in a simulation for 400 days to simulate long distanced space travel and the psychological effects this might have on the astronauts. Now instead of actually showing our protagonists slowly losing their minds in this simulation the film just says, "ain't nobody got time for that" and tries to rush to the "plot twist" as quickly as possible.

Now I bet you are wondering what exactly happens in between the beginning of the film and the end. Well I can summarise it in a couple of sentences for you. Our main characters go from being sane, calm and intelligent human being to insane and stupid human beings in the space of only 15 minutes. Well in film time it's more like 200-300 days but to the audience the change only happens over the course of 15 minutes. This doesn't give us enough time to connect with the protagonists, it doesn't give us enough time to understand what they are going through in their lives and it doesn't give us enough time to care about them and what will happen to them when they eventually go insane. I'm pretty sure the writers where either high or drunk when they thought this would pass for a good story.

Now enough of the boring protagonists lets talk about the ending because that's always fun. So our main characters find a guy who looks like he has been deprived of any oxygen and can't talk properly because of this. The man escapes from the ship and the crew find out that they have been losing oxygen for days and days now. So in a moment of panic they decide to leave the ship to figure out what's happening. They find that they are surrounded by dust and rock, after analysing the dust they find out that it's moon dust. So the crew leaves to go find people and figure out what has happened. After finding a creepy guy in a creepy town they find out that some explosion happened on the moon and then the planets oxygen depleted and moon dust was scattered on the earth? I'm not really sure what happened it was't explained very well. So one by one the crew members start to disappear until there was two left, the towns people insist that there was only ever two left. The towns folk try to chase our 2 last crew members to the simulation area underground. The crew members fight them off and a message is played in the simulation congratulating them on making it to 400 days and the screen fades to black.

There are a lot of things wrong with this ending so let me list a few of them here: 1. What actually happened to the moon and how does the moon being blown up drop the amount of oxygen on Earth? 2. Why didn't you just say it was all a simulation or a dream. There was plenty of proof in the film to suggest that it was a dream, hell the film looked like it was going to do that. 3. Why can some people in this town talk properly and others can't?

There's more issue with this film that I could get into but I would be here for days, in short the film is boring, has a rubbish plot, misses every opportunity to at least be interesting and has astronauts that aren't mentally stable enough to even be astronauts.
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