A skiffy story with great visuals, some moral and philosophical questions, and some romance for good measure. And a few nits that stood out -- nits of the sort that always bother me. First, there would have been no call for the automated announcement about the slingshot maneuver around that sun since there would have been no reason for the original programmers to think that anyone would be awake to see it. If the writers and director were committed to showing those visuals to the audience, then they should have just let Aurora and Jim discover the event for themselves as it occurred. Second, pretty much everything about that tree was wrong, from the water questions to the potential issues if and when its roots broke through the deck and all kinds of things in-between. Third, probably not a good idea to put your reactor plant at the front end of your ship, where it will take the brunt of any ramming damage. Fourth, a complete lack of logic behind the turning-around question. All things being equal, if it takes X amount of time to get from A to B, then it should only take X amount of time to return from B to A. Even a slow turn that takes a week to execute is nothing in relative terms in a scenario like this one. And lastly, given how much must have been spent on building the ship as a whole, would it have killed the money people to splurge and include more than one autodoc for a crew of 258, as we're told at the outset? While I'm willing to accept the fact that there was no reason to expect problems with the 5,000 hibernation pods, any engineer worth his or her degree would insist on better redundancies and a backup plan or two in case something did go wrong as it did here. In any case, nits aside, the primary four actors here and the visuals and the underlying story itself were all strong enough to survive those nits, with plenty of room to spare.
Review by Jim G.BlockedParentSpoilers2017-06-06T23:05:56Z
A skiffy story with great visuals, some moral and philosophical questions, and some romance for good measure. And a few nits that stood out -- nits of the sort that always bother me. First, there would have been no call for the automated announcement about the slingshot maneuver around that sun since there would have been no reason for the original programmers to think that anyone would be awake to see it. If the writers and director were committed to showing those visuals to the audience, then they should have just let Aurora and Jim discover the event for themselves as it occurred. Second, pretty much everything about that tree was wrong, from the water questions to the potential issues if and when its roots broke through the deck and all kinds of things in-between. Third, probably not a good idea to put your reactor plant at the front end of your ship, where it will take the brunt of any ramming damage. Fourth, a complete lack of logic behind the turning-around question. All things being equal, if it takes X amount of time to get from A to B, then it should only take X amount of time to return from B to A. Even a slow turn that takes a week to execute is nothing in relative terms in a scenario like this one. And lastly, given how much must have been spent on building the ship as a whole, would it have killed the money people to splurge and include more than one autodoc for a crew of 258, as we're told at the outset? While I'm willing to accept the fact that there was no reason to expect problems with the 5,000 hibernation pods, any engineer worth his or her degree would insist on better redundancies and a backup plan or two in case something did go wrong as it did here. In any case, nits aside, the primary four actors here and the visuals and the underlying story itself were all strong enough to survive those nits, with plenty of room to spare.