Hiran Patel

Spoilers ⚠️ The film never really recovers from pretty ridiculous mission parameters and supposed scientific advances made in 40 years times whilst managing to ignore the nascent technologies in development and use in our own lives like virtual assistants. It's No Raised by Wolves by any stretch. I'm not going to dignify any of the eugenics stuff. There haven't been any effective new psychiatric pharmaceuticals in decades and we are meant to believe in a blue liquid will turn complex human beings into robots. Here's a thought why not send actual robots?! Humans have some how managed to perfect living in zero gravity yet somehow humanity's best hope is not to start living in the clouds but to give up on presumably billions of people and to do Noah's Ark minus the animals. The writers only needed to spend a few hours in closed settings like a psychiatric or penal facility to come up with more plausible human dynamics than what we are ultimately given. I recently Vigil about characters based on a nuclear submarine. The claustrophobia ought to be palpable as well as the burden of responsibility instead we get whining kids saying 'I don't wanna'. To be fair it is good old fashioned hard sci-fi. But before humans had been to the Moon or realised there are no Martians. These children have never been allowed to the see the sky yet somehow know what aliens are and they're scared of dark. Away from nitpicking on the scientifics the film doesn't work as a teen romance as it is implausible that Sela would 'pick' Christopher as her mate and that either of them would even be in the running for Prom King and Queen. I wanted to like this film but for me it falls apart the second it becomes a Murder She Wrote episode. The logical thing at this point would have been the discovery of another crew with actual grown ups doing the actual work with the children being just that. I was half expecting the children to be rescued Lord of the Flies style. Not a complete waste of an afternoon but you might want to binge watch some proper sci-fi instead. Nice effort but needs work.