My wife and I watched this at home on DVD from our public library.
Frankly I had no idea what to expect. The story starts with Brad Pitt as Roy McBride, working on an International Space Antenna, so tall the commercial planes fly far below and workers have to wear space suits because of the lack of oxygen. Think 8 to 10 miles high. When an unexplained surge causes serious problems, Roy has to jump off and parachute to safety.
Then the story turns to a suspicion that Roy's astronaut dad, Tommy Lee Jones as Cliff McBride, didn't die all those years ago but in fact is alive near Neptune and somehow is responsible for the dark matter surges that are harming Earth. And to make the mission even more dramatic, they fear if left unchecked it could destroy all life in the Solar system. So Roy's mission, which requires him to take a commercial flight to the Moon, then a secret flight to Mars, before heading to Neptune, would be to track down Cliff and bring him home, and in the process destroying the source of the rogue surges.
That is a pretty important and complex mission and suffice to say not everything goes as planned, Roy has to get very inventive. The space travel is a Macguffin of sorts, it isn't integral to the central idea which is the father-son relationship, but trying to find a long lost dad in the vastness of space is better than looking for him in the Amazon.
I see they used NASA as consultants of sorts, but they had to play fast and loose with the science here. Climbing onto a spacecraft while it is already in the process of a launch? Beyond far-fetched. Avoiding pirates on the moon, what? No personal flying drones yet? No orbiting drones to shoot down crooks? Getting to Neptune in a bit less than 3 months? Neptune is almost 3 billion miles away, it took Voyager 12 years with gravity assists from other planets. And a whole host of other things. But they needed to include some action.
So, if you evaluate a movie like this solely on believability of the science and the action then you will be disappointed. But if you judge it on the quality of the story and characters then it is nicely entertaining and asks serious questions about how we humans relate to each other and to our existence in general.
