I stumbled upon this movie and unfortunately missed the beginning, however it was quite easy to catch up on the basic plot. What first intrigued me was that the info button showed this as one star, yet the little bit of dialogue I had heard seemed pretty intelligent (a grouchy meal time exchange is happening when a lovely character who looks uncannily like Natasha Richardson comes in and cheerfully says "good morning" and another character replies, "how does she know it's morning, or even good"...also another actress looks very much like Felicity Jones). I have no faith in the ratings done by these cable services--I once saw Citizen Kane rated 2 stars (it's since been updated to 4) and Deadpool, 4 stars, and the 3 Godfathers described as "...three outlaws on the lamb..." Yikes. ...so I dove in. I notice many of the scathing reviews here are from at least 4 or more years ago, pre-Trump. One of the things I noticed immediately about this movie is how perfectly timely it is. We have had the hottest recent years on record, the EPA is being stripped, auto emission regulations reversed, he's bringing coal back (yeah, right), and climate scientists are saying that without CO2 emission reductions, we're on track to be at 900 parts per million for CO2 by 2100 (in context, pre-industrial revolution, about 200 years ago, CO2 was 280 ppm). We are on track to recreate the early Eocene Epoch. A baby born today will be 83 in 2100 and by the time his or her grandchild is 83, it's possible life on earth will pretty much resemble the dystopian vision portrayed in so many science fiction works. And thus we land in the world of Spacecraft IC-1, where a group of people are carefully chosen to go to an Earth-2 colony and populate it with a healthy, as perfect as possible genetic line. Meanwhile, back on messy old earth, the population is oppressed by what sounds like a nefarious dictator class and a strict code known as RULE, "the Reformed United League Executive council". This apparently was supposed to take place in 2015 (something I probably missed at the beginning)--fast forward to 2017, and instead of trying to fix this beautiful, perfect planet full of trees, rivers, mountains, waterfalls, butterflies, and rainbows (thanks Bill Maher), we have pledged NASA 20 billion dollars to send men to Mars. Billionaire hobbyists are busy spending their spare change on elaborate bomb shelters in New Zealand and manned Mars missions, because what do you do with all that money--certainly not help your fellow man on Earth. One of the main criticisms of this movie is how cheap it looks--in other words, it doesn't have a glossy, futuristic look. Please remember that this was made in 1965, 4 years before man landed on the moon. Under the circumstances, I think the film's vision is just fine. In fact, I admire that they put the characters in ordinary clothing and didn't try to cook up some crazy futuristic look. It kind of reminded me of the simple look of a Twilight Zone episode. Keep in mind, if you re-watch the original Star Trek, it looks pretty cheap and cheesy too by modern standards. The other part of the movie's plot that I thought was pretty well done was that of mutiny. Really, mutiny is timeless and what happens aboard Spacecraft IC-1 isn't so very different than what happened on the Bounty. Overall, of course the special effects are very outdated by today's standards, but if you overlook this, the story is complex and intriguing, the acting is decent, and the dialogue is quite well-written. Give it a chance.
