2036 Origin Unknown

What writer and director in 2017 would think it's a grand idea to resurrect the worst of so-called "science fiction" from the Seventies and Eighties, including the mind-numbing kaleidoscopic effects that were stand-ins for actual special effects?

There is no science on display here, though it is certainly fictional. Fiction without science is just fantasy. Exploitation of a few trendy buzzwords and concepts from STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering, Mathematics) does not make it scientific. There is neither any deep thinking. The plot and concepts are incoherent, like the hallucinogenic "trip" of a career drug addict. The writer apparently had an extended trip himself and began to imagine himself as a philosophical genius who had wisdom to impart to the rest of us?

He isn't and he didn't.

I watched it to the end. Katee needs a new agent. This movie was terrible. Only reason it got funded was I assume because she was in it. So bad.

... if you understand that SciFi doesn't need to be about exploding space ships and exotic aliens. I like how the "think about..." SciFi came back in the last few years with movies like Arrival. This is similar in setting. Everything plays out in the command center of an exploration mission. It starts out a bit boring, but after the discovery on Mars I got hooked. Then in the end it got all messy. The computer does something pretty much unexpected and inconsistent with its previous behavior (like ONE minute before), after that we get an ending which seems to try to mimic the ending of 2001 with a little bit of Contact spliced in, but in a way that seems like the writer thought "It has to be hard to understand for the audience. What better way to achieve this is there than writing an end I myself won't understand?" The ending of 2001 is easy to comprehend in comparison.

So Starbuck goes into the mission control room and starts to engage with Hal who is operating the Mars lander. A minute passes. Then another minute and before long another minute has passed. Hal and Starbuck converse and try to solve the issues as another minute passes. 94 minutes later. ..roll credits

It's 2030. Mars 1 crashes on the planet after getting hit by an energy field. Six years later, Mack Wilson (Katee Sackhoff) leads the investigation into the crash chaffing under the artificial intelligence computer ARTI's control. They find an object of unknown origin.

This is reminiscent of an old style sci-fi magazine story. British filmmaker Hasraf Dulull started in CGI and videogames into trying to make these smaller budget sci-fi movies. This could have been a Twilight zone episode although it may still be not good. It's stuffed with CGI scenes of a Mars mission. The human scenes consist mostly Sackhoff, a computer voice, and a techie room. The movie lacks a human touch and a human story. In short, it lacks humanity no matter how hard Sackhoff tries. It's only good for a shorter sci-fi TV episode.