Stephen Donaldson

This movie is a bit of a mess and seemed like the result of a rough draft rather than a polished, finished script. It's a lot of flash with very little substance. The characters are one-dimensional and not fleshed out at all. The plot is poorly developed with very little reason given to care about the continued existence of the imaginary friends. To compensate for the lack of genuine emotional concern for the characters through good storytelling, a sweeping, soaring orchestral score is employed to try to evoke some sort of feelings in almost every scene, with very little success. It is tiresome, as is the movie as a whole.

***SPOILERS*** The concept of putting one person's consciousness into another person's body has been done numerous times before, and almost always to much better effect. Everything was quite obvious, so there was very little mystery or suspense. The attempts to address class and race were sophomoric at best. In fact, the entire movie was rather juvenile. Knowing even the bare minimum about hypnosis makes it impossible to take this film seriously. If it had been rewritten as a comedy, it might have fared much better.

The main problem with this movie is the characters. A trillion dollar mission to travel 500 million miles to another planet to seek out our literal makers, potentially the single most important discovery in the history of humanity, and they populate the crew with the most unstable, unprofessional, unreliable group of unbelievable characters imaginable. They all just act on their emotions and don't follow any kind of logical protocol, making one extremely poor decision after another. They take off their helmets without any idea of what kind of contaminants there might be. One minute they are completely freaking out about a pile of long dead alien bodies, and the next they are trying to pet a very much living alien creature as if it were a lost puppy. I'm sure they did a lot more stupid things, but I couldn't watch anymore.

The movie's desire to be something grand and awe-inspiring fell far short of success. I never became emotionally involved with any of the characters or the plot. Even though the actors all put in worthy performances, the whole thing just felt hollow.

Such an interesting premise that they did absolutely nothing with. A complete waste.