El Titán

Training people to live on an uninhabitable planet because the earth is becoming... UNINHABITABLE. Say that again slowly. Why does he have to go to Titan? Why can't they just train his body to survive the new harsh weather on earth? I don't have a problem with the acting and special effects, I just feel like the story was not well thought out.

Just watched Titan and wow, it made me angry. I rarely write movie reviews, but this one moved me to action. Since Netflix no longer allows reviews on its site, here's my first IMDB review.

This crappy script is a waste of excellent acting talent and awesome special effects.

Kudos to the actors who did the best they could with an uneven script, faux-science, WTF scenes and progressively more stilted dialogue.

The movie isn't bad for the first 45 minutes. I had figured out it wasn't going to have a satisfying ending by that point, but I wanted to see how they'd spin it, so I kept going. The faux-science was fun to eye-roll over.

But then our hero soldiers finally go through the full metamorphosis (after a "what? why did they need surgery?" scene) and are unable to talk, change facial expressions, write, or in any other way communicate except by "sonar and touch".

And from that point, the script went completely into a FTW-WERE-YOU-THINKING tailspin. So many stupid actions in such a short time can make a movie-watcher dizzy.

The coup-de-grace was the final 18 minutes. It's like the producers said, "Let's just do a few disassociated scenes. No one is watching anymore, anyway." I lost track of how many times I said, "Wait, what?" So many times.

Netflix, fess up. Is this steaming pile of a movie, and your other original programming, the reason you no longer allow reviews? If you can't handle poor reviews, improve your quality management. Now you've forced people to find other public forums to air their opinions. That probably means fewer positive reviews (because why go to the effort when we liked the movie?), more negative reviews (because we want to warn people away from bad ones) and lower ratings (because we're mad about having to click to another site to leave the review).

In the near future, the world is overcrowded and its resources are dwindling. A project headed by Professor Martin Collingwood (Tom Wilkinson) proposes to populate the Saturn moon Titan with genetically altered humans. Lieutenant Rick Janssen (Sam Worthington) has brought his wife Abigail (Taylor Schilling) and son Lucas. As the volunteers get altered, some are dying while others are showing volatile signs.

Nothing happens for too long in this movie. Nothing ever happens behind Worthington's dead eyes. This could be a body horror but it does not do that. It really doesn't do much. I'm not a Worthington fan but I thought maybe Manhunt: Unabomber had given him new acting life. Sadly, this movie asks nothing of him and he gives them nothing. After his transformation, his alien face turns blank which is just as well. The emotional climax has no emotional content for him. This is a blank.

So yes, many of its story elements have been done to death. Our Earth is no longer inhabitable because of a nuclear war, we look to the stars for a new planet to settle and make a new world, experimenting and genetically modifying humans to make a super-human, only to have it go wrong. But even though its been done to death, it wasn't necessarily bad, I found it to be very averagely done and honestly could have been and often has been done much worse. So while I wasn't enthralled by the story, it also wasn't a mess like many other films that use the same plot points, the story points were relatively well presented and I can only really describe it as average. Pretty much what you saw in the trailer is what this film is all about, not many alterations on the basic plot points.

Everything else was admittedly average but not bad. I like the cinematography, which I found to be the best part of the film, the camera use and the color scheme were at least visually pleasing. The acting was also very average, though the film has many good actors, their performances were not their best, but also couldn't be considered their worst, as I said, very average. The writing wasn't anything to be amazed about, dialog wasn't very engaging but that might be because I've seen many movies that have the same plot points as I mentioned above. So all in all a very average film, didn't find it bad even though the many plot points have been done to death. I would only really recommend this film if you have nothing better to watch.

I was so intrigued to watch this movie, the trailer I saw made the film look awesome. The first twenty minutes or so I really enjoyed. I got into it immediately, the acting was really rather good, the story very interesting, but something seems to change, it's almost as if they switched directors or writers, as the film just turns into a real mess, it was hard to follow, almost every character was hard to like, and you find yourself asking 'what's the point.'

I'll applaud the acting, and special effects, the latter in particular were great, but overall there was just something about it that I didn't like, if I'm honest I was bored.

What was he going to do on his own on that planet?

Mehhh. 4/10