Sebastian Cordero directs "Europa Report", a film in which humanity hops aboard a spaceship, flies to Jupiter and spots a giant florescent octopus. The film has been praised for its realism. By scientists. Seriously.
"Europa Report" takes the format of a "found footage film", we the audience bombarded with snippets of surveillance footage, sensor reports and staged interviews. It's an annoying aesthetic, but the film's plot is itself mostly dull and familiar, degenerating into a low-key slasher movie in which unconvincing astronauts are unconvincingly killed in unconvincing situations.
Like most recent science fiction films, "Europa Report" pulls heavily from the past, cribbing its aesthetic from "2001: A Space Odssey", its spinning ship from "The Year We Make Contact", its dread from "Alien" and so forth. A scene in which an astronaut sacrificially allows himself to die in space is likewise uncomfortably familiar to a similar and better sequence in Brian DePalma's "Mission to Mars".
Shot on a low-budget, "Europa Report" contains one wonderful, oft repeated shot: a camera, affixed to the rear of a departing spaceship, watches as humanity's Sun slowly shrinks into a pinprick. This shot, returned to again and again throughout the film, suggests the vastness of space, its terrifying emptiness and the painfully slow pace of human spaceflight. In a film filled with supposedly smart astronauts, icy abysses and subterranean spaces, it's the deepest thing on view.
5/10- Worth one viewing. Read Peter Watts' "Blindsight", one of the best first contact novels of recent years.
"Europa Report" takes the format of a "found footage film", we the audience bombarded with snippets of surveillance footage, sensor reports and staged interviews. It's an annoying aesthetic, but the film's plot is itself mostly dull and familiar, degenerating into a low-key slasher movie in which unconvincing astronauts are unconvincingly killed in unconvincing situations.
Like most recent science fiction films, "Europa Report" pulls heavily from the past, cribbing its aesthetic from "2001: A Space Odssey", its spinning ship from "The Year We Make Contact", its dread from "Alien" and so forth. A scene in which an astronaut sacrificially allows himself to die in space is likewise uncomfortably familiar to a similar and better sequence in Brian DePalma's "Mission to Mars".
Shot on a low-budget, "Europa Report" contains one wonderful, oft repeated shot: a camera, affixed to the rear of a departing spaceship, watches as humanity's Sun slowly shrinks into a pinprick. This shot, returned to again and again throughout the film, suggests the vastness of space, its terrifying emptiness and the painfully slow pace of human spaceflight. In a film filled with supposedly smart astronauts, icy abysses and subterranean spaces, it's the deepest thing on view.
5/10- Worth one viewing. Read Peter Watts' "Blindsight", one of the best first contact novels of recent years.