Reviews

If you were a lady who woke-up out of cryo-sleep early on a big starship, and found the only other person around was a creepy white dude who has read all about you. What would be your natural reaction? Well the mostly male writers at Hollywood, having clearly never met a human female in real life, seem to think a woman in this situation would immediately assume the guy has nothing to hide and start screwing him.

She doesn't investigate, she doesn't try to wake-up anyone else. She doesn't try to find out why the pods malfunctioned. She doesn't check the other pods systematically to see if this guy is a serial killer who is waking-up and killing off female passengers. (which would actually be a more interesting plot.) Nope, she just hooks up with him like there is nothing weird or creepy at all about his situation.

And then when a robot tells her that the guy woke her up intentionally, what does she do? Keep it to herself, form a plan. Nope. Hollywood thinks that all women do is throw tantrums. Because apparently in this world women are not afraid at all of being stranded alone in space with a mentally unstable impulsive man. She isn't afraid at all that if he knows, she knows, he might do something even more insane.

So of course while these dip-sticks have been prancing about playing with toys, instead of using their brains to investigate their problems, the ship starts to loose power. At this point, conveniently a commander who actually has some intelligence is brought out of cryo-sleep. (something the creepy-guy could have done at the start of the film if he had had even a tiny amount of perseverance to get the doors of the command deck open.) The commander is like, "why have you guys been messing about for two years while the ship is falling apart?". Then dies form cryo poisoning or some bull-dust.

At this point the creep and the dumb-blonde put their differences aside to mend the ship and save their asses. Which they somehow manage to do despite, zero technical training. I mean I'm assuming starships are a little more complex than just, switching it off and back on again right? Not in Hollywood they ain't.

Due to some minor tension when the guy has to open a vent, Blondie forgives him entirely for ruining her life and bounces back into his arms. They discover that a medical pod can put one of them back into cryo-sleep for the rest of the journey, thus saving them from a life of loneliness. At this point we are expected to believe that the crazy creepy guy, who just risked everything to save his own skin,(he wasn't doing it for the 5000 passengers that's for sure) gives up the pod to Blondie.

Now this is the only part of the film that is plausible. Blondie refuses to go into cryo-sleep, which is 100% in-line with her character of a person who makes really poor decisions based entirely on emotion. (Any other person would have vented the creep out of an airlock, and enjoyed a nice fat book deal at the end of their cryo-sleep.)

Who, what, when, where, these are basic questions that a film must answer in order to make any kind of coherent sense. This film fails to provide adequate details, and no amount of beautiful lighting technique can fix that problem. The dialogue is terrible, the sort of dialogue a high school drama class might write during a class-room acting exercise.

Three young-adults accept a job to supervise gifted children in an underground facility. The young-adults do not ask any questions about the assignment, as they need money, and all willingly accept a non-disclosure agreement. Upon entering the facility they use augmented reality glasses to see, as the facility has no lighting (with the exception of a predictably limited number of defective emergency flashlights). They are also provided with a virtual artificially-intelligent guide (that later we learn was constructed and controlled by the gifted children).

For a brief portion of time it appears that one of the young-adults is having hallucinations but we soon discover that the vision their glasses provides is being interfered with by the gifted children. The gifted children attempt to frighten the young-adults and the young-adults attempt to escape the facility with one child whom they believe is not aggressive like the others.

Eventually it is revealed (predictably) that the child they are trying to escape with is leading the others and has augmented reality contact lenses (the most unexciting twist I have ever seen). Two of the young-adults appear to be killed by the children. The remaining one seems to begin the movie at the start again, perhaps suggesting that the young adults were either VR AI or prisoners being mentally manipulated.

Questions! Why are they children in the underground bunker? Corporate experiment, government experiment, this is just how the future of childhood will be, none of these answers are provided....Why does one of the young-adults return to the beginning of the movie? Was she an AI the children created as part of their augmented reality, was she a human prisoner being continually brainwashed to repeat the game..... What is the point of the children's play-time? Is this part of their training, is this part of their recreation, why choose that particular game instead of say tennis.... What time period is this set in? It's not the past, but that is about all we can assume.....Where is this set? In space, on earth, on mars, there are very few visual or verbal clues. We know that they are in a bunker, but if the adult characters are all VR then the location could be anywhere..... Where are all the adults (and do they know what is happening to their kids)? Do they receive false communications from their children, do they approve of their children's education, have they been forced to give-up their children to the boarding-school system, do the children even have parents or were they grown in a lab.

Assuming that an audience will be able to infer the authors intentions without a sufficient amount of semiotic evidence, causes the audience confusion and frustration.

This film perfectly sums up the two-faces of the post-war generation, on the outside people put on a brave face, whilst just under the surface they are in emotional distress. It is very different to the other films in the Huggett series, which are primarily cheerful family comedies.

Mr & Mrs Huggett and their grown children arrive at a holiday camp to "enjoy" themselves and put the worries of war time behind them. The people at the holiday camp do tightly scheduled activities, distracting themselves from dwelling on their past and present problems. (Keep look-out for the hilarious novelty bicycles that regularly roll through the background). The only truly happy characters in this film are Mr & Mrs Huggett and their two youngest children, who seem oblivious to the tightly guarded emotional problems of the adults around them.

The eldest daughter of the Huggett's is clearly depressed by the loss of her husband, and yet social pressure from friends and family forces her to begin dating again. At one point, she refuses to enter a beauty pageant with her friend, so she is physically picked-up and carried by two men who drop her into the ques of beauties. All the single women we meet are full of sad nervous energy as they desperately try to work-out how to appease the men around them.

This film contains themes of suicide, teen-pregnancy, substance-abuse and loss, all set against ridiculously cheerful backgrounds of people enjoying wholesome holiday activities. If you want to avoid devastation, DON'T watch the last 20 minutes. This film unexpectedly ends in the worst tragedy for the most vulnerable character, whilst contented characters remain innocently oblivious to the suffering around them.