3022 (2019)

I don’t know what the point of this movie was supposed to be. Even the “happy ending” that we got was objectively terrifying and everything else was incredibly stupid.

Let me back up that statement:
Per the opening scroll, some corporation set up a colony on Europa, Jupiter’s moon, in the mid-2100s, because why not. No reasoning was ever given, and it was never noted if there were other colonies in the solar system.
Then said company built the Pangea space station…somewhere. It was explained to be a resupply point between Earth and Europa, but was only three months away from Earth.
For context, it took the Curiosity rover 9 months to get from Earth to Mars.
Which means that Pangea wasn’t even on the far side of Mars, and thus nowhere near the mid-point of a such a trans-system travel path.
And beyond that: Pangea was never shown to have any resupply assets of any kind. Like… at all. They didn’t have additional food, or fuel, or life support systems to handle more than the four crew members. No hydroponics bays, no massive solar fields to collect additional electrical power, no nothing. I don’t think the writers actually thought through their own set pieces.

Why am I harping on those things?
Because they’re not particularly difficult or novel ideas.
Science-fiction and the concepts of deep-space travel are not new in the media. “Star Trek: The Original Series” (1966+) came out 53 years before this dumpster fire, and Neil Armstrong walked on the moon three years later. Space travel and the requirements therein are not new.
Good science-fiction has spent the last five decades showing us what near and far-term space travel should look like.
As much as I didn’t like “Interstellar” (2014), at least it didn’t try to pretend that physics didn’t exist, or that space stations could afford to just have massive open spaces where you could just spread-eagle on the floor.

Oh, and three of the four crew members on the Pangea smoked. Repeatedly.
You know, that thing that you really shouldn’t do in a high-oxygen environment where the sensitive air filters are the one thing separating you from suffocation.
And I can’t even pretend that somehow this version of 2190 had better technology that enabled stupid tricks like nicotine addiction: the ISS was shown in orbit, looking exactly the same way it does now in 2020. Clearly there hadn’t been meaningful technological progress, or the ISS would have been massive, or replaced, or simply gone.

Inexplicably, the crew of the Pangea was made up of rotating teams of four, each of whom took over control of the station for a decade. The US team that this movie followed was at least the third crew on the station, and I cannot fathom why anyone would volunteer to spend 10 years in a habitat in the inky blackness of space.
They didn’t even bother to throw in a line about “I’m gonna be so rich when I get home!” that would justify such a personal sacrifice from anyone, especially for the one crew woman who had a daughter on earth.

The one thing this movie got right was that the Pangea had Taurus rings – rotating habitat chunks that would create artificial gravity. It allowed the movie to be filmed with almost no zero-gravity scenery, because everything happened in the rings.
In exchange, they got something even more wrong: it was stated that the Pangea used small thrusts of oxygen to “course correct” on whatever its course was on, with no way to create more oxygen.
Why?
Why would you waste the thing that you breath?!
We already have non-oxygen-powered thrusters: the Dawn satellite that NASA launched in 2007 had ion thrusters that didn’t require it to expel a molecule vital to human survival.
Why would an “advanced” space station 183 years in the future use a worse method of propulsion? Why wasn’t that engineer fired?!

And because I’m very mad about the “science” of this station: the medical officer apparently wrote all of his documents on paper – you know, the white cellulose stuff that you have to make from trees, or special recycling plants – despite the fact that there were plenty of tablets and computer terminals shown all over the Pangea.

I should probably talk about the plot now:

The Earth exploded.
No reason given.
Terra Firma just went poof, like Krypton.
The explosion was strong enough to damage the Pangea way out in the middle of nowhere, and the four-person crew were left alone in the universe without as much as a comm link to Europa.
Then they started dying, because of course they did.
Lisa (Miranda Cosgrove) hit her head and spontaneously bled out.
Richard (Angus Macfadyen) went bat-shit crazy and blew himself out of the airlock. When Captain John Laine (Omar Epps) tried to reach out for him with the CanadaArm-type graspy-stick that the Pangea had, it spontaneously disintegrated and floated away.
Jackie (Kate Walsh) developed a morphine addiction and was able to freely access what appeared to be an unlimited supply of the stuff, despite not being the medical officer and existing in a closed system with no production capabilities.

Three survivors from the ISS straggled their way to the Pangea three months after Earth spontaneously disintegrated – Diane (Jorja Fox), Vincent (Enver Gjokaj), and Thomas (Haaz Sleiman). They were easily the most realistically portrayed characters, as Vincent was willing to kill anyone necessary to hijack the Pangea and pilot it to Europa on the off-chance that the colony there still existed.
The thin veneer of civility had been ripped from him; he was a drowning man and was on the verge of drowning anyone who tried to help him stay afloat.
All three of them died anyway.

Somewhere in there, the back half of the Pangea was blown off, as it was apparently consuming too much oxygen and thus contributing to the overall failure of the station.
Yeah… that’s how that works.
So the back half of Pangea was blown away, along with half of the solar panels and Jackie, because the plot needed one more stupid thing to happen.

During the majority of the build-up, we were cursed with watching flash-forwards of John alone on the front-half of Pangea, trying to get the ISS’s shuttlecraft up and working and trying to communicate with either the back of Pangea (and Jackie) or Europa.
And apparently John was going crazy, so we kept having to see his mental breaks/hallucinations/night terrors, which added nothing to the movie and were just a time sink with zero payoff.

The majority of the movie happened in the three months between Earth exploding and the Pangea exploding, but there was no indicator of time passing.
From the day of the explosion to the ISS shuttle arriving, you could have told me it was all of seven days and I would have believed it.
In fact, I did. The story was written so poorly that I couldn’t tell any appreciable amount of time had passed until Jackie explicitly said so.

And I’m going to spoil the ending for you, because sweet mercy this movie is bad and you shouldn’t watch it: John found the back-half of Pangea, got inside, and found Jackie, alive.
That’s it.
That’s the “happy ending.”
7+ billion humans dead, and the only two remaining are in a derelict station somewhere in the asteroid belt with a drastically limited amount of life support material; one was an addict and the other was crazy.
Yep. “Happy.”

This movie started in year five of the 10 year rotation, so when John made his final captain’s log during year eight, as he set out to find Jackie, he noted that it was his 3022nd day as captain, so the title fit, even though it was kinda dumb.
“3022 Days” would have been a much better title, but at least it wasn’t completely incongruous like “Always Be My Maybe (2019).”

The soundtrack for this was non-existent. It really could have used something good, or at least boringly orchestral.

The special effects made the original “Star Trek” look fancy.
That’s an impressive feat.

Please do not waste any time on this.
It was so boring and two-dimensional and devoid of useful logic or reason.
Let Netflix eat the cost of this failure and let’s go forward pretending it never existed in the first place.