Magellan (2017)
IMDb meta-data is a runtime of 1 hour and 43 minutes, rated 5.2 by 1694 members of the producers’ extended families.
Genre: Sy Fy
DNA: Yankee
Verdict: Meh
Tagline: Me, myself, and I.
In sum, the one-man crew sets off on a ten-year mission and talks to the camera in close-up for about half the runtime. There are actors who could make that engaging, but none of them were available for this film. The only explanation for the one-man crew is the producers’ budget. Why the mission must take ten years is anyone’s guess.
Here is the set-up: SETI has received and tracked three radio signals. (See, overkill. One would be enough. And overkill leads to boring repetition in lieu of development.) Off Hero goes, leaving behind for those ten years a wife and child after five-minutes of thought. No one will go with him but he loves his own company, so fine.
Like the audience, he passes much of the time asleep, repeats three searches on three heavenly bodies – two moons and a dwarf planet. We see each wake-up call. We see each search. Each time he finds an opaque glass orb tennis-ball size that seems to the origin of the signal. He reports this by instantaneous communication from Neptune. Sure. But he himself shows little interest in them since he is a pilot not a scientist. Yep, perfect man for the job. When he touches a ball with his bare hand, he has LSD visions of the cosmos which he does not report, least somebody tell him not to play with the specimens, I guess. (Confession, finding the dialogue so trite I turned down the volume for a lot of the runtime, especially when I hit fast-forward.)
In his communication things seem to be changing at Mission Control, but that hint is not developed. His spiffy controller slowly deteriorates into a ragged and haggard man. Ditto he seems to lose internet in wife and home.
It goes on, and on.
On the plus side, I am always intrigued by first contact that isn’t a shoot ‘em up. And the glass balls were a surprise but the novelty wore off by the third time. The Space Odyssey visions of the cosmos were fun but had no meaning and might just as well have been drug-induced.
On the other side, with a one-man crew there is no interaction, no second opinion, no tension, no teamwork, just sleep and awake. By the way, in the ten years his hair did not need to be cut, since there was no other member of the crew to do it, apart from Siri and Alexa. The repetition of searching for and finding the balls was a killer. Someone should have introduced him to his wife: in their few scenes and interactions before departure, they seemed to be strangers.
Some reviewers excuse its faults because of its low budget but the problems are in the story not the colour of the walls of the space ship.