BEFORE: OK, so as we get closer to Memorial Day, I forgot to mention that the linking necessitates the inclusion of some sci-fi movies - the World War II movies did not all link together, as it turns out. We had "Never Let Me Go" last week, and we need a little bit here, and then one more sci-fi film next week, these are needed for me to get six WW2 films in before the end of May. Let's not forget that it's also National Mental Health Awareness Month, I've already covered bi-polar disorder, alcoholism, addiction, body issues relating to beauty pageants, mommy issues related to, umm, having mothers, and grief and loss and whatever was going on between Jim and Tammy Faye Bakker. And I'm sure we'll see some war-related PTSD before the month is out, also.
Colin Farrell carries over from "Ava".
FOLLOW-UP TO: "The Midnight Sky" (Movie #3,967)
THE PLOT: A crew of astronauts on a multi-generational mission descend into paranoia and madness, not knowing what is real or not.
AFTER: The year is 2063, and climate change has ravaged Earth, making it nearly unliveable (still could happen) and at the same time, a planet is discovered that seems to have near-perfect hospitable conditions to support human life - it's got water, it's not too close to its sun, its not too far away from its sun, and there's not a hint of a real estate agent anywhere - yet. So naturally the hu-mans make the decision to try and colonize it, because that's what they do. There's a tight window to get a crew together and launch before society commits suicide by way of carbon emissions, but the only problem is, humans barely made it to the moon without going cuckoo bananas, even the trip to Mars is currently considered too far for humans to travel in a tight, claustrophobic spacecraft, not without cracking up.
Also, it's going to take about 86 years to travel to this new solar system, so for all involved, it's going to be a one-way trip. Look, we tried cryogenically freezing humans and then un-freezing them at the other end, but that just never works out in science fiction - that's the movie "Alien", isn't it? Yeah, not good. Also all the other times fictional NASA sent fictional astronauts out into space as ice cubes, from Buck Rogers on up, something always goes wrong.
So, since time is of the essence, and the crew needs to leave very soon, and they can't find astronauts willing to die in space just so their grandchildren can reach a new world, the world governments do the only logical thing - they grow their own crew from babies. Wait, wait, hear me out, it may take 15 or 16 years to grow this crew, but it might have taken at least half that long to train adult humans, and by using teenagers - specially bred, raised and trained teenagers - they maximize those astronauts' usefulness, their prime years, so maybe the human race gets there in three generations instead of four. And that saves food, oxygen, and other resources.
You can follow the logic here, right? These 30 kids are grown in artificial wombs, from genetic material taken from Nobel-winning scientists and other geniuses, and they're kept isolated from the rest of the human race, they never get to go outside, because then when it's time to go into space, they won't miss the wide-open spaces of Earth, because that's not what they know. They won't miss any family members because they don't have any. They'll be accustomed to the tight spaces on the spaceship because they were raised in a similar environment. All of this looks really great on paper, really, it's an excellent plan. Plus they're trained to obey the rules of space travel and follow the orders or the Prime Directive or whatever, it's what they live for.
And of course, they'll need to bear children while on the spacecraft, but the regular birth method is so messy, so random, so unpredictable. As long as we've got these artificial wombs, why not send a few of them along into space, so the childbirth process can be totally risk-free, monitored and leaves almost nothing to chance? If the first crew (aged 12 at launch?) has children when they're all 24, and then those children have children when they're 24, those grandchildren will be in their 50's when they reach the planet. Wait, that math doesn't really work out well, does it?
And then, of course, they don't want these teens to have sex on their own, because that would make more babies than needed, and waste food and oxygen, so the teens are all given a daily drink with ingredients designed to lower their sex drives, and make them all more docile and willing to follow the program. Again, it all sounds great on paper, it's perfectly logical.
So, of course, something's bound to go wrong. Their mentor, the only father figure they've ever known, volunteers to go along for the ride, because a little adult supervision could be helpful, plus he's at a point in his life where he's getting older, he's got no relationships tying him down, he's going to die at some point anyway, why not in space, sacrificing himself to help these teens run a spacecraft? What could POSSIBLY go wrong?
Well, the mentor gets a little friendly with a female crew-member - nothing like THAT, no #Metoo moment here, he just makes a friend, and he shares with her pictures of home, to tell her what it was like to live in a house, have a family, sail a boat, you know, innocent stuff. But around the same time, a couple of the male teens on the crew figure out what's in that blue drink that they're told to have every morning, and start wondering what it might be like to NOT be drugged into complacency. Yeah, bad idea - because this leads to teens having sexual feelings, emotions like jealousy for the first time, and all the wonderful brain drugs that reward our pleasure centers hit them all at once.
Things get ugly between the teens and the adult mentor - that seems only natural, what normal teen doesn't rise up and challenge parental authority at some point? But it doesn't work out well for the mentor, he dies during a space-walk and then there are rumors that he was killed by an alien, the one that lives on the outside of the ship in deep space and makes that creaking noise. Probably this is just like that sound you hear when you're a kid trying to go to sleep and your parents tell you it's just "the house settling", not some kind of monster. I don't know about you, but finding out that the house I lived in still hadn't found its final shape was pretty unsettling, too. Please, let's go back to thinking there's a monster in the walls...
When left to their own devices, and off their meds for the first time, the whole spaceship descends into chaos - nobody wants to do their jobs, they just want to eat and make out with each other, all of which is against the rules. Then paranoia sets in, the crew is divided into two camps, one that believes in the space monster and one that doesn't, and soon anybody who doesn't believe in the monster is singled out as the monster's host, and then the result of that isn't very pretty, either.
If you're thinking this all sounds like a modern version of "Lord of the Flies", only in space, you're not far off at all. I'm also reminded of "2001: A Space Odyssey" where the mission went wrong because the astronauts didn't know the full parameters of the mission, and HAL the computer was programmed to lie to them. And then there's a whole political angle here, with two opposing camps with two different ideologies, and no space for rational thought in-between. Hmm, what does THAT remind me of? So there you go, it's "Lord of the Flies" meets "2001" filtered through the American two-party political system of the last few years. (NAILED IT!)
If I were running a Psychology 101 class, I'd show this film on Day 1, because it raises a bunch of questions about what behaviors are innately human, and which are acquired along the way - nature vs. nurture, in its strictest form. Sure, people are hard-wired to reproduce, or to WANT to reproduce, or to at least accept pleasure in some form (not everybody's a breeder, I get that.). And then you're on Freud, talking about the id and the superego and what hang-ups might get in the way of being happy, which problems are real and which are self-sabotaging neuroses. And then there's conditioning behavior, like if you're raised in a particular environment to do certain tasks, will that make a person happy or at least peaceful, and that's Skinner and Pavlov. And which needs take precedence, those of the individual or those of the collective? Then you're on Jung's theories of individuation and sense of self, plus all the analyses of world leaders over the years, what kind of person becomes a dictator and all that. Work in something about Communism or Socialism, and you've nearly got your thesis written.
But still, I've got to wonder what this film says when it posits that being competitive and slacking off is the default setting for humans - again, these teens were RAISED in an environment where work was part of their lives, their daily structure. So they should act more like 1800's European kids, who were ready to work in the coal mines or sweatshops, that would be more normal for this particular group of twenty-somethings, right? They don't know any other way to BE. So, are humans born competitive, or is that something they learn on the playground? Are humans born to be lazy when we can, or is that behavior that the rich and entitled ones picked up along the way, because they could? Discuss. But remember how entitled and assholish the Millennials are now, and then project that forty years into the future - think how terrible the grandchildren of Generation Z are going to be. I'm just saying, it could happen.
NITPICK POINT: The launch of the spacecraft can be delayed for 10 years to grow the crew from scratch, but it can't be delayed a few more years to build a faster spacecraft? Just asking. If they developed space engines at the same rate we've improved computers over the years, waiting another 10 years and spending that time on making faster engines could cut the trip in half. Maybe?
Also starring Tye Sheridan (last seen in "The Night Clerk"), Lily-Rose Depp (last seen in "The King"), Fionn Whitehead (last seen in "Dunkirk"), Chanté Adams, Quintessa Swindell, Archie Madekwe (last seen in "Midsommar"), Isaac Hempstead Wright (last heard in "The Boxtrolls"), Viveik Kalra, Madison Hu (last seen in "Bad Words"), Archie Renaux, Wern Lee, Veronica Falcon (last seen in "Jungle Cruise"), Laura Dreyfuss, April Grace (last seen in "Joker"), Lou Llobell, Reda Elazouar, Mariska Ariya, Theodor Soptelea, Andrei Cristian Anghel, Vu Hoang Viet, Saleh Mohamed Daoud, Pan Jiaqiang, Nicholas Samuel Sealey, Elena Raducanu, Ioana Brumar, Julienne Kadima, Phan T. Thao, Petruta Petrea, Victoria Ecaterina Moraru, Irina Artenii, Ioana Teodora Nimigean, Hoang Anh Nguyen.
RATING: 6 out of 10 cafeteria trays (wouldn't it make more sense for them to eat in shifts?)
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