Viewers of earnest sci-fi dramas like I Origins are required to suspend disbelief, but the scripters of such movies have responsibilities, too. They can’t introduce ideas so ridiculous, or suddenly twist their premises so illogically, that audiences are fatally distracted.
Take, for example, Snowpiercer, set on a frozen future Earth. While a home nestled in the warm bedrock would be the logical place to wait out an ice age, let’s accept that the few surviving humans are instead circling the globe on a “high-speed” train. But then the filmmakers throw in the notion that it takes a year to make a complete circuit. That means, if the train is tracing the Earth’s widest circumference, it’s moving a little under 3 MPH. A snowpiercing bicycle could beat that.
In Dawn of the Planet of the Apes, great care is taken to show that the CGI apes follow genuine simian psychology. So when one chimp challenges another, the two fight for dominance. But then the loser skulks off and does what he wanted to do anyway, which negates the whole setup.
Writer-director Mike Cahill’s I Origins is even more cavalier about its own ground rules, although not until its second hour. In the first part, bio-researcher Ian (Michael Pitt) tries to disprove Intelligent Design proponents’ claim that the human eye is too complex to be a result of evolution. So he tinkers with the genes of blind worms, hoping to demonstrate how easy it is to give the critters sight.