"Easy as cake. Piece of pie."
The fallibility of the human species is as strong as it ever was. It remains to be seen if we could get our collective shit together if presented with a global catastrophe and this petty squabbling is brought into sharp focus here.
I was curious to see events, captivated as I was in my younger days when Roy Scheider played Heywood Floyd in 2010, piggybacking his way to Jupiter on a Russian ship edging its technology quicker than the US, when politics became a pre-cursor to *discovery.
And granted, this looks the part. The picture is at pains to regale us with all of the handicaps that unforgiving space has to offer, before we even have to deal with something so inconsequential as 'a bit of a tiff'. Peter Hyams' and Arthur C. Clarke approached this very same subject in 1984 with a completely different focus, on the ultimate cooperation of astronauts and cosmonauts in spite of any earthbound issues from their superiors.
Whilst 2010 was littered with a cast you would gnaw off one of your own arms for with the likes of Scheider, John Lithgow, Bob Balaban and Helen Mirren, this isn't exactly meagre in regards to talent, most notably a personal favourite of mine, Pilou Asbæk (the draw, tbh), Ariana DeBose and Chris Messina who maintain the much needed gravitas in times so delicate and forbidding.
Whilst locales may differ, the inherent threat is the same, even if it is just a short hop home on the bus compared to the orbit of Europa. The script here isn't a patch on Clarke's, lacking any real humanity in the potential species' well-being, more akin to a ruck in space, just like on the ground below. This fails to believably spin the grand galactic opera of existence in the same way to inspire its demanding audience.
*human endeavour, not the ship that went looking for it.