400 Days

400 Days

Starring Brandon Routh, Caity Lotz, Ben Feldman, Dane Cook

Directed by Matt Osterman

The Story:
Theo Cooper (Brandon Routh), Emily McTier (Caity Lotz), Bug Kieslowski (Ben Feldman) and Cole Dvorak (Dane Cook) are enlisted to participate in a government experiment: live in an underground bunker for 400 days to test the long-term effects of space travel.  As the days drag on, the astronauts experience hallucinations, fights, and other psychological effects that threaten their sanity.  When a stranger appears in the bunker with them, they discover another hatch to the outside world, and decide to investigate.  What they find isn't what they expected, but is it all a hallucination?

The Synopsis:
SyFy does it again with one of their original films, but at least with this one they found a more popular cast and spent more to not make effects so terrible, but it's still an awful movie that doesn't make sense, give us crudely drawn characters, and supplies a twist ending that leaves the viewer angry and wanting interpretation.

We have Brandon Routh as the team captain, and all we find out about him throughout the film is that he and Emily used to date, but she broke up with him days before the experiment and he spends most of the film getting drunk, reminiscing about good times, and that's about it.  Caity Lotz plays the doctor, who spends most of the film injecting the other astronauts, conducting personality and memory tests, also reminiscing about better times, and that's about it.  Ben Feldman's Bug Kieslowski is the ever-optimistic character who has a son (we don't find this out until way later in the movie, or it could've been referenced earlier on and I just didn't care), finds a mouse on board to hopefully keep as a pet, and that's about it.  Dane Cook's Cole Dvorak is your typical frantic member of the team who spends the film wanting female companionship, not talking about his family, acting goofy and then incredibly paranoid, and that's about it.  Each character is so rudimentary that you could've just taken any stock character from any disaster movie and paste them into this film, and no one would know the difference.  

Aside: Why would anyone cast Dane Cook in anything?  He's not the least bit funny, and him trying to act serious is possibly the only time I get a chuckle out of him.  Aside done.

So we have four main characters that are as flat as wallpaper and we care less about than said wallpaper possibly getting ripped, and then we throw them into a story that looks intriguing on paper, but executed with the same talent as a hackneyed high school drama teacher who gave up believing in himself decades earlier.  The idea of putting four people in an underground bunker to test the psychological effects of being in space for 400 days was an intriguing one, and I personally enjoy those outer space thrillers ("Moon," "2001," "Gravity," "Alien," "Aliens," "Interstellar," "The Signal"), so I figured this was right up my alley.  Instead, the film was so poorly written that, along with the stock characters, we got a stock story as well.  The astronauts become paranoid.  They think everyone is out to get them.  They see things that clearly aren't there yet they really feel like they are.  Cliche, cliche, cliche.

When the mystery really begins to unravel, you don't give a flying care about it.  Typically I love a good mystery, studying the film to find the minuscule clues, but here I just wanted the whole thing to end.  After they reach the surface and find everything's changed, I was interested for about half a second, but then I remembered what I was watching and just didn't care anymore.  The mystery didn't make sense, and then the ending was so infuriating it made me upset I wasted even seconds on this humdrum affair, although I was thankful that it finally ended.  So, there's one positive the movie had going for it.

The Summary:
For anyone who would actually be a fan of this movie, it would literally take 400 days to try and figure everything out.  For everyone else, you'll spend 400 days regretting seeing this piece of trash.

The Score: D-