This movie started out pretty great because there are good graphics and the story behind what i going on in the world is actually pretty interesting and well, is a more conceivable future for the planet than most of the other Sci-Fi stories that exist out there.
The story is that the earth is nearly out of energy resources and this crack team comprised of member from all over the international community is up in space messing with astrophysics in order to produce what is meant to be an unlimited source of energy.
To keep things moving, they don't explain what is actually going on, but we are meant to understand via a montage that they continue to fail and the project goes far over the scheduled time-frame. Eventually, they achieve what appears to be a partial success but it comes with a very heavy price.
I can't tell you more about it than that because to do so would be to destroy the very essence of the film. The film remains quite interesting even after the big reveal and on occassion there are some scenes on the ground and even flashbacks into the life of Ava Hamilton (Gugu Mbatha-Raw,) who is the only person on the ship that we are given a backstory about.
The CGI is done very well, and the pacing is reasonable and the story is actually pretty compelling. Now onto what i didn't like about it. I don't think they had enough money to tell the entire story so what then ended up doing was actually drawing out certain elements of this story and making it take too long in order to have a full-length film.
They also have the usual elements of someone has figured something out but none of the other crew members want to believe said person despite the fact that everyone on the crew has already witnessed some pretty crazy things and should therefore give the other members the benefit of the doubt. Because everyone refuses to believe the "crazy" discoveries the film adds another 30 minutes of useless dialogue. They also have certain objectives that must be achieved in a certain time-frame and this is meant to add tension but mostly it is just annoying to have a countdown that you know (because of the style of this film) is going to be achieved. They do this over and over again.
Furthermore, there are certain "traps" set by paranormal entities for certain members of the crew and this results in their demise yet it is never explained who is making this happen, and why.
They also have a Chinese that only speaks to everyone else in Mandarin and everyone seems to understand what she is saying despite the fact that only one other person ever says anything in her native tongue and this is very rare. In that way she was kind of like the Chewbacca of the group, everyone can understand her even though no one speaks her language. It is not terribly conceivable that a scientist would be put on a team if they couldn't communicate with the other team members.
Basically i found this movie to be a real mess of a story that doesn't really answer any questions so much as it just introduces more of of them with the convoluted mess of tragic activities that makes this more like a horror film where the bad guy is gradually stalking all the members of the crew. It just doen't make sense to me. It is unclear as to how this film would have made money since it was exclusively on Netflix. I suppose it is reasonably entertaining as long as you don't really need the story to actually make sense.