One flick to forget

The Titan

Starring: Sam Worthington, Taylor Schilling, Tom Wilkinson

Director: Lennart Ruff

Genre: Sci-Fi, Thriller

Rating: PG-15

RUNTIME: 97 Mins

Try to imagine one of the most intriguing concepts to come out of a premise in recent months, produced by an avant-garde media company such as Netflix, and then screened worldwide for everyone to enjoy.

Now imagine the execution of said concept to be a mostly boring and redundant experience with very little redeeming value. That’s a fairly accurate way of describing The Titan.

In the near future, in 2048, humankind is facing a difficult reality after centuries of environmental damage and overpopulation render the planet nearly uninhabitable. A military family is chosen to participate in a ground-breaking experiment to accelerate man’s genetic evolution in order to relocate humanity to another planet.

Playing Rick Janssen, the hero ready to risk his life for the future of mankind, is Sam Worthington, everyone’s favourite classic macho soldier, often thrown into a world of technology and advanced civilizations that he doesn’t understand.

Science-fiction and action-adventure continues to give Sam Worthington more than his fair share of opportunities to prove he is not, in fact, the blandest actor alive.

It’s not as though he’s unlikeable. He has an effortless levity that if channeled wisely, could actually have the power to bring one of his characters to life with more than just throwaway curses and schoolboy gruffness.

His portrayal of Rick Janssen is at best a C+ performance. Though the chemistry is there between him and his family, including his wife Dr Abi Janssen, played by Taylor Schilling, and his son, Lucas, played by Noah Jupe, one can’t help but think it’s more their success than his.

Schilling only just escapes the same average grade, with a more varied and complex performance as a supportive partner growing unsure of how to be with someone not conventionally human anymore.

More often than not, she steals the scene from Worthington with her despairing search for the truth. Schilling’s holding up the morality mirror here, showing us that sometimes what is necessary, is not what is right.

The true delight here is Tom Wilkinson, who plays Professor Martin Collingwood, the mastermind behind the Titan relocation and genetics programme. Poised, intelligent, and secure, he is the man standing tall as everything collapses around him.

This is a film that could have gone one of two ways, and yet sits uncomfortably straddling both. Either it tosses aside tired sci-fi clichés like human experimentation gone awry, or the fate of the world resting on one man’s poor heroic shoulders; or it embraces the B-movie values that it on occasion hints at with full gusto.

It would have been so refreshing to see a film that actually looks at the intricacies of living on a different planet, or brutally exposes the unsanitised version of events under such duress.

Instead, we have bland, bleak, and boring. The Titan seems unintentionally determined to put you to sleep, even if it does on occasion throw a bout of random violence or human-amphibian gill-rippling at you to keep you just slightly enticed.

Netflix has created some remarkable television and cinema over the last few years, yet this film misses the mark on many levels. The few moments of genuine tension presume a certain apathy on behalf of the audience, especially since there’s little to no development of the majority of the characters introduced.

It came, it saw, it tried to conquer, but they’re not reaching for the stars with this one.

Now showing in: Cineco, Seef II, Dana Cinemas, Wadi Al Sail, Mukta A2, Al Jazeera

Anna’s verdict: 1/5