Netflix's newest sci-fi thriller mashes together The Fly with something that might be Prometheus fanfiction. That is to say, while it's not terrible, it's a mess.
In a not-so-distant future, the overpopulated and war-torn Earth is looking to Titan, one of Saturn's moons, as a possible new home. Sam Worthington (is he playing a character, or just himself? I never really know) is recruited by Tom Wilkinson (forget the character names; they're unimportant) for an experimental training program that will prepare humans for the extreme conditions of the alien moon. The rigorous training and horrific experiments claim the lives of most of the team, and when Worthington is finally left standing as the sole success, he is no longer entirely human.
The Titan really wants to be profound, and I think that's what makes it fall flat. It centers on abstract ideas about human identity, evolution, and exploration. The heart of the story, it would seem, is not with the test subject himself but with his wife and son. The two watch, horrified, as their beloved man is injected and augmented with animal DNA and traits until he becomes a forced evolution of humanity. Homo titanien, he is labeled. What a crock. He looks like the bluish, scaly Engineer from the Alien franchise and can't communicate. He's a Frankenstein monster, but then the film lurches into a bizarre conspiracy mess about government agencies and money and other boring stuff that allows Wilkinson to be wicked. The film wants to be scientific but neglects to explore novel questions and possibilities: What would colonization actually look like? How would a single successful experiment become a legitimate wide-scale medical procedure, and who would undergo such a transformation?
Perhaps its primary problem is its budget. Shot in a gorgeous house that frankly steals the movie, it would seem the production only had funds for sets and salaries. Then again, the problems here are abundant. The special effects leave a lot to be desired, the script teeters violently between cerebral and campy, and half-baked ideas and sizable plot holes make navigating the movie at once treacherous and tedious. It doesn't help that Taylor Schilling is so desperately trying to make up for the lack of acting from her starring counterpart. Director Lennart Ruff doesn't know whose story he wants to tell or how to tell it. Its first two-thirds are a moody, broody character study with a lot of sci-fi freakshow buildup; its final stretch is body-horror-meets-romance with some gimmicky thriller elements, and none of it feels like it belongs to the same film.
I was left with a sometimes pretty, sometimes ugly movie with sometimes smart, sometimes silly ideas and a so-so attitude. If James Cameron or Ridley Scott or J.J. Abrams had been involved, I could imagine any of them attempting to rework it into an early prequel of some of their respective projects. That's why I think The Titan is fanfiction: It hadn't the budget nor the vision nor the copyright allowance to become greater than it is. That's not good for a movie about evolution.
Save your time for Annihilation. It's just better.
IMDb: The Titan
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