Origin Unknown

This wasn't very good.

Movies about AI always want to be thought-provoking, and at the same time they always reinvent the same wheels over and over. This movie is no different.

If this had been made in the 80's, it would probably be considered a much better movie. But this is 2018 and you really have to bring something better to the table, especially if you want to preach a certain message.

I'm guessing there was a clear lack of budget, because apart from the CGI quality that ranges from barely passable to outright terrible, they had to invent some "science" and background to the story to justify the lack of actors and sets; the movie takes place in one room, and it's 90% Katee Sackhoff you see on screen.

This is not necessarily a bad thing, because with a great script and a great actor you can really create something wonderful (and CGI be damned). But the script overall is just so poor and Katee Sackhoff, who manages to pull off a decent performance (but no more than that), simply can't carry something like this and just drowns in the bad dialogue and overall story that unfolds around her in a largely illogical and mostly very unoriginal manner.

The pacing overall is slow, but not too slow for me personally, and nearing the end it does try to offer some sort of resolvement, with a little twist. If the movie itself had been better up to that point, I probably could have appreciated that effort a bit more. It also didn't help that most of the bigger questions are actually never answered and that the last 15 or so minutes were apparently filmed through a kaleidoscope.

All in all, not an unlikeable movie, but it's just not good at all. 4,5/10, rounding it up to a generous 5.

What writer and director in 2017 would think it's a grand idea to resurrect the worst of so-called "science fiction" from the Seventies and Eighties, including the mind-numbing kaleidoscopic effects that were stand-ins for actual special effects?

There is no science on display here, though it is certainly fictional. Fiction without science is just fantasy. Exploitation of a few trendy buzzwords and concepts from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) does not make it scientific. There is neither any deep thinking. The plot and concepts are incoherent, like the hallucinogenic "trip" of a career drug addict. The writer apparently had an extended trip himself and began to imagine himself as a philosophical genius who had wisdom to impart to the rest of us?

He isn't and he didn't.

Holy cow, what a steaming hot mess this movie is. It somehow manages to feel simultaneously confusing, boring, cerebral in a terrible and condescending way, and extraordinarily amateurish. I'm not really sure I managed to follow the plot. It starts with a manned mission to Mars in the near-future that goes awry for unknown reasons, moves on to what is basically a one-woman show about an earth-based astronaut (think drone program , but in space) working with an advanced AI to investigate what went wrong during that mission, and finishes with scenes that I think are meant to suggest a 2001-ish symbolism concept. But honestly my understanding is based upon a lot of guesswork. It feels incomplete because if I did understand the basic plot correctly it is just filled to the brim with plot holes and bizarre assumptions. And the last twenty minutes is so dull that I fell asleep. I would just avoid the movie.

... if you understand that SciFi doesn't need to be about exploding space ships and exotic aliens. I like how the "think about..." SciFi came back in the last few years with movies like Arrival. This is similar in setting. Everything plays out in the command center of an exploration mission. It starts out a bit boring, but after the discovery on Mars I got hooked. Then in the end it got all messy. The computer does something pretty much unexpected and inconsistent with its previous behavior (like ONE minute before), after that we get an ending which seems to try to mimic the ending of 2001 with a little bit of Contact spliced in, but in a way that seems like the writer thought "It has to be hard to understand for the audience. What better way to achieve this is there than writing an end I myself won't understand?" The ending of 2001 is easy to comprehend in comparison.

So Starbuck goes into the mission control room and starts to engage with Hal who is operating the Mars lander. A minute passes. Then another minute and before long another minute has passed. Hal and Starbuck converse and try to solve the issues as another minute passes. 94 minutes later. ..roll credits