It occurred to me that I am not using my blog here as often as I used to. Part of that is due to the simple fact that I mostly review movies here, so if I don’t see one that is new to me, I am unlikely to write anything here. So, with the new year off to a decent-enough start, I opted to look into something to watch on a Sunday afternoon, maybe even something on my Fill-in Filmography poster. As it is, I found the Swedish-Danish sci-fi film Aniara. I had put it on my Max Watchlist, but the movie left the service before I could get around to it, and then I found it again on Hulu, ad-free somehow. There will be no tension-breaking commercials this time around like there was for Alien:Romulus.
However, given this movie came from Scandinavia and what little I knew about it before pressing “play,” I might have preferred an ad-break here and there as it was bound to be depressing.
In point of fact, this movie is depressing, but appropriately so given the premise: a shuttle, transporting a large group of humans from a ruined Earth to a new home on Mars, goes off-course and may not be able to find its way back to where it’s supposed to go. The ship, the Aniara, is a luxury liner basically built dor a three-week journey. The main character here is a woman known only as the Mimarobe (Emelie Garbers), a woman whose job it is to run Mima, a computer system that allows people to experience their best moments on Earth in some sort of VR type of environment. Such a task seems trivial as the Mimarobe has a hard time getting people interested in trying it out as the movie starts. But then there’s an accident: to avoid some space debris, the Aniara makes a wide swerve. Unfortunately, a piece of debris hit the ship and caused serious damage to the fuel reserves. The good news is the crew thought fast and managed to keep the ship in one piece. The bad news is they had to jettison all the fuel to do it and cannot correct their course to get to their original intended destination. That said, they can use the gravity of the next celestial body they pass to slingshot themselves back around to get to Mars. The captain ( Arvin Kananian) reassures everyone that that should take no more than maybe two months at most.
Small problem: it takes a lot longer than that. As predicted by the more cynical astronomer (Anneli Martini) that shares a bunk with the Mimarobe, there won’t be any such celestial body. And while the captain makes like everything is fine, that they can produce algae to eat when the food runs out, and they can treat the Aniara like its own planet, that’s not the right way to approach the situation. Then again, there may be no right way to approach this situation as the Mimarobe finds her job is suddenly a lot more popular. That is, until Mima, absorbing memories from the passengers using her, takes in too much terror about what happened to the Earth and commits suicide. It only gets worse from there.
I suppose, normally, I might not have given away quite so much about the plot as I do here. But I think the movie is less interested in the plot and more in how humans behave in what is, essentially, a very slow-moving, doomed scenario. The food will run out, and algae doesn’t take all that good. People will form cults, commit suicide, and go a little insane just looking out at the blackness of space every day for who knows how long. Even when something that might offer hope shows up, it ends up not really working out as anyone had hoped. There are ways to maybe make things work, but this is a ship full of people of all ages–yes, even small children–so what can be done? Do they carry on life as normal? Do they mourn the planet that they lost? Do they just give up?
These are the questions the movie asks, and the answers they give may be as depressing as I said the movie would be above, but the answers are also appropriate for the situation. There really is no hope for the people on this ship, and eventually, even the most optimistic people will realize that. As accidents and human behavior just keep piling on the feeling that these people need to do something, even if it’s just to try to find an escape from their situation, the movie’s message may be a simple one: don’t ruin the Earth as there may be nowhere else to go.
Grade: A-
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