As I do somewhat often, I deliberately avoided any opinion pieces (aka reviews) regarding this movie, but had seen the previews. However I’d stereotyped the type of film somewhat inaccurately. The film proved somewhat surprising in other words, such as by including a song number, a female vocalist (and main character) hearkening back to those noirs of the 1930s-1950s I’ve been sampling.
I’d expected more of a special effects high action movie, with a lot of kinetics, and this film had that, but its axis of emotional depth as well as intellectual depth was more than that of many comic book derivatives I associate with this genre. I haven’t read the novel behind it, which explains a lot of my cluelessness, which I was fine with (I’m clueless about a lotta stuff).
The smart part is its juxtaposition of high school biology with phenomena of an astrophysical scale, condensing solar systems to Petri dish ecosystems model-able in the lab. Suns are dying because of an infection, and antibodies must be sought. The humans push their technology, leveraging the very biohazard they’re fighting, and the one guy at the tip of the human spear encounters a counterpart with the same objective, so they form an alliance.
As we were leaving the theater I overhead one viewer saying “I didn’t expect it would be that funny” which well-encapsulates my own sense of surprise as well.
