What I'm Watching: The Titan

In grim future world, LA is uninhabitable (is funny joke: LA's been the Hellmouth since the 1960s), and Earth is dying, except for the nice wooded river and pristine forests they keep visiting in this dumpster fire of a movie. Soldier boy Rick is gung ho to be converted into a genetic superman so he can colonize Titan.

Saturn's moon, Titan. Which yes has an atmosphere, but there's 0% Oxygen, not the 5% this dumb movie says. It's so fucking cold -179°C your flesh would crystalize and shatter. There's no Sun or even Saturn itself visible under the atmospheric haze, we know because we dropped the Huygens probe in and saw a muddy haze! No energy for plants, and if there's life it'd be cold, slow, alien microbes or fish. Titan is not a place you can just bioengineer a person for. Mars might be dry and cold, but it's a sunny day in Antarctica in comparison.

Actual Landscape of Titan:
Titan-Huygens View

Mystical Wonderland Titan at end of movie:
the-titan-mystic-wonderland

The military base at the end of the world looks an awful lot like a suburb with a couple nice houses the filmmakers rented, and some industrial ugly office building. Zero set decoration effort.

Everyone walks around spouting short technical phrases learned from Wikipedia, but clearly neither the writers nor the walking meatstick "actors" know what they mean. When anything goes wrong, these supposed mid-21st C scientists & soldiers all turn to prayer. To what god?

The "what went wrong" meetings after the soldiers start going wrong are hilariously bad, unlike any conversation you'd have about a failing project. "Catch up or stop holding me back!" "Nature is unpredictable. Everyone evolves in a different way." ? Evolution works on populations, not individuals, you stupid stupid, STUPID writers.

Then suddenly the soldiers are all freaky Abe Sapien mutants with tentacle fingers and flying squirrel membrane wings, and it turns into a half-assed and joyless slasher flick.

★☆☆☆☆ and I wish I had the chemical lobotomy drug from the movie so I could unsee this.

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