The Beyond

The movie centers around a wormhole that abruptly appears near the Earth, and the attempt to figure out what's on the other side. It takes the somewhat interesting approach of not focusing on what is encountered, looking instead at what goes into the mission. Trying to send probes in, trying to come up with a way for humans to survive the journey. Trying to choose people to put through the procedure that will theoretically allow them to survive. Dealing with setbacks.

And once the ship returns, then it's trying to figure out how to get usable information out of the crew, and decide what the information they get really means, and whether they can trust it. This is set against a backdrop of tension due to a bunch of dark spheres that appeared by the dozens on Earth shortly after the wormhole.

The movie is presented as being shot by a film crew following around members of the "Space Agency", and interviewing them and other relevant people over the course of events. Which, considering the film crew was following the head of the Agency as part of shooting some video for employee training, seems suspect? Especially when they get a member of the Department of Defense (with face in shadows and voice distorted) to talk about the Human 2.0 project. The scientists working on said project are allowed to speak on the record about what they're doing, in fairly extensive detail. You would think the government in question - I'm guessing the U.S., because turning wounded soldiers into Robocops to send back into battle seems very much something the U.S. military would do - would demand more details be kept under wraps.

I went in expecting that more of the film would focus on going through the wormhole, and what they find, exploring, problems arise, quick thinking saves the day, that kind of stuff. So I was fairly bored by the film. I appreciate they tried to go a different approach, but sitting and watching people sit and talk about preparing to go into space is not as exciting as watching people actually go into space.