What I liked about this movie:

• The initial dystopian setting.  The filmmakers play around with time in a fun way: we see elderly people talking about what life was like in the olden days, and then we flash back to a farm in the Dust Bowl era, so it comes as a surprise when we see that one of the things a character dusts off is a pretty advanced-looking laptop.  It turns out that society has collapsed to the point that even though it’s the future, it feels more like the past, and the rural setting confuses the issue even further: a cornfield in 2035 looks pretty similar to a cornfield in 1935.  As for the dust, well, this is a new Dust Bowl, as ecological catastrophe is upon us, though it’s not very well defined.  Initially it’s presented as a matter of crops succumbing to blight: first went the wheat, and now the okra’s failing.  (Personally I could live without the okra.)  But that doesn’t account for the dust.  Eventually we get a handwavey explanation that the blight will lead to a severe enough depletion of atmospheric oxygen to kill us all, which suggests that it’s actually killing off all plant life, including the grasses that affix the topsoil and the trees that serve as windbreaks.  But no one actually says this, so fixating on the okra seems like it’s kind of burying the lede.  In any case, while this may not the world’s foremost example of meticulous world-building, I thought the balance between “this is a world that is very close to ending” and “this is a perfectly normal world with parent-teacher conferences, baseball games, and bookshelves” was spot on.  Each made the other seem eerie.

• Exoplanets!  There is basically nothing that I like in movies as much as depictions of realistic alien worlds.  In this one the worlds are pretty boring: there’s a water world, a glacier world, and a rock world.  I think all of them were filmed within a short distance of each other in Iceland.  And yet I was more or less agog at all these sequences.  The basic idea is that with Earth about to lose its viability as a human homeworld, NASA has sent a dozen explorers through a wormhole to find a planet (one each) and report back whether it seems like a viable colony world.  Now our crew is chasing down those scientists to follow up on the positive reports.  It’s not too different from my beloved Starflight in that respect: traveling across the galaxy, finding a planet, establishing an orbit, running scans, sending down a lander to pick up samples, and reporting back a yes or a no.  The fact that the planets have nothing particularly interesting about them just adds to the magic.  I’m not as convinced as I once was that there must be intelligent life elsewhere, but water worlds, ice worlds, rock worlds?  We know they’re out there.  And the thought that the universe is strewn with worlds like these, every bit as real as the one on which we stand⁠—that, as I type this, sprinkled throughout the cosmos there are undoubtedly waves slowly rippling through globe-girdling oceans and piles of slush collecting on cracked plateaus… I mean, dang, how can that not give you chills?

• Time dilation.  I’ve seen time dilation used as a plot element in any number of stories, but it was still cool to watch a movie with a very specific ticking clock: “For every hour in this gravity well seven years pass outside, and I don’t want my young daughter back home to die of old age while we’re on this planet gathering data.”  Speaking of whom:

• The ten-year-old genius girl.  If you have read Ready, Okay! or played Photopia it will probably come as no surprise that this character was relevant to my interests.

What I didn’t like so much about this movie:

• The looping plot.  I’m pretty tired of the whole setup-callback gimmick.  Here we had a movie that had felt so expansive⁠—a dozen worlds to explore!⁠—and instead the filmmakers turned it into a small, closed loop.  Feh.

• “A million deaths is a statistic.”  This is one of those movies that boils down to “Oh, sure, it’s about the potential end of the entire human species and the establishment of footholds on worlds a hundred thousand light-years away… but really it’s about whether this guy’s daughter will get over her abandonment issues.”  I get the argument that, hey, abandonment issues are something a lot of people deal with, while the end of the species is just a fanciful sci‑fi macguffin… except accelerating climate breakdown actually is a thing and the end of the entire human species is very much on the table unless we start taking significant steps to prevent it.  Again, the movie looks like it’s going to be big and ends up disappointingly small.

• Almost all the dialogue.  It falls into the category of “Hey, let’s talk about the themes!”  The filmmakers supply a whole lot of chatter chatter chatter about the stuff we should be thinking about instead of letting us actually think it.  There’s an exchange early on that goes like this:

  “We’re going to be spending a lot of time together—”

  “—we should learn to talk.”

  “And when not to.”

  “When not to” is something the filmmakers apparently never learned.

  Furthermore, a lot of the themes the characters do articulate are dubious.  When the main hero sneers, “We’ve forgotten who we are: explorers, pioneers, not [disgustedly] caretakers”, well, that’s so obnoxious that it’s possibly the first speech I’ve ever heard that turned me against space exploration, and yet by putting in the mouth of the main hero, the filmmakers do seem to be endorsing it.  Meanwhile, the character who correctly points out that we are hamstrung by the fact that we think small, that our “empathy rarely extends beyond our line of sight” and that that’s a problem?  Yeah, that’s the villain.

• Bailing on Earth.  I’m all for trying to become an interplanetary species, but the idea that “oh, if things get bad enough on Earth we’ll just find another planet” is silly and dangerous.  As many have pointed out, the most dire apocalypse that humans could inflict upon the earth would still leave it far easier to terraform back to a viable habitat than Mars would be.  In this movie we’ve got a friendly wormhole to point us in the right direction, but absent the intervention of five-dimensional travel agents, the likelihood that we would stumble upon a planet we could live on without terraforming seems vanishingly small.  Selection pressures shaped us to fit in here.  Change even one of countless factors⁠—add the slightest trace of a toxic gas, say, or throw in a microbe we can’t handle⁠—and taking off that helmet is inadvisable. 

Finally, I was amused by the fact that the big robots have their names stamped into them in giant block letters⁠—with a braille version underneath.  Also giant, so that you can’t actually read it with your fingertips.  Assuming that you were in fact a blind person running your hand over the giant space robot in order to find out what it was called.  I have to think the ghost of Douglas Adams would approve.

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