My goodness..

Oh yes, the other maybe working alternative might have been to go full soap with this. Lots of close-ups of the characters having extreme feelings. If the actors would have been willing to do that, at least the 'Nasa astronaut' lead seemed as if he was mostly focused on either his paycheck or what he would do once the filming was over. Well, he had a pretty good run as the male lead in the parent series of NCIS, it is perhaps a little painful to be reduced to something like this.

Not to talk about poor Julia Ormond, who once got roles in big budget Hollywood productions. Yes, those 'refugee camp' scenes were among the more painful, especially considering that the quarry never looked like anything else but a quarry, and were among the ones which should have been ditched altogether, but since she was one of the at least potentially better actors I would have kept her, just figured some other role for her. Or maybe added the character to the city scenes with the adult son.

One thing this thing kind of underlines is how much actors can depend on the director and writing. At least both Elliot and Ormond have given decent and sometimes quite good performances in other productions, here both seemed to be sleepwalking most of the time.