Watched this yesterday as I stayed home sick with a mild fever.
Now normally when I watch horror movies with a mild fever, it adds the experience. This time I spent much of the movie wondering whether the nausea I was feeling was the flu moving into my gut or my distaste for the movie. I’m pretty sure it was the former, but like the movie, cause and effect are kind of muddled here.
Spoiler-free, this was a mashup of Event Horizon and Sunshine, while being orders of magnitude worse than either of those movies. But it’s also free (assuming you have Netflix) and mercifully only 90-odd minutes long so if you want to follow along bashing the movie the price of admission is low.
Now for some spoilers
Wow what a mess. None of the horror elements made the slightest lick of sense. The sci-fi elements were likewise awful.
So they sort-of switched places with another station in another reality, but imperfectly. That nicely explains the woman in the walls. It kind of explains why the worms ended up in the Russian gun (since people got switched, maybe other organic life flopped around too?). It really doesn’t explain why the gyroscope ended up in the Russian as well, but I guess it was a halfway decent horror-pun on the nesting Russian dolls they showed in silhouette a couple scenes before.
The arm thing was just out of left field. Who the hell is on the other side of it? Presumably the alter-O’Dowd was killed in the destruction of the alternate station. And if it was yet another iteration of O’Dowd from some third reality, then how does he know about the Russian having eaten the gyro? What is the “prime” O’Dowd’s arm doing? Can he control it? Should he too be warning the crew of whatever other universe’s station it’s on?
Why did Ziyi Zhang’s character drown/get frozen in the airlock? That was just pure “haunted house” crap. And if anyone was wondering – no, water doesn’t flash-freeze when exposed to hard vacuum; Zhang’s character would have been sucked out into the void surrounded by a sparkling mass of water droplets which would have sublimed and frozen into a icy mist as she suffocated over the course of the next couple minutes. Also - terrible design to have your precious water system hooked up to your airlock.
Same thing with the silly magnetic thing that killed O’Dowd’s character. No real explanation for it other than “haunted house”, and that final scene of him getting magnetic crap stuck up his nose had no relation to what had been shown previously. Ugh.
Honestly, the best thing I can say about this movie is that 100% of the “horror” scenes shown in the Superbowl ad turned out to be utterly benign in their actual implementation. The creepy “go hug your children” line turned out to just be her telling her alternate self to… go hug her kids. The disembodied arm was comic relief. The dangling tentacle-monster was just a shot of a worm experiment.