BEFORE: Sports movie, family drama, mob comedy. Yeah, I know I'm all over the place this week but tonight's a sci-fi astronaut movie, so I continue to be all over the place. That's OK, it's what January is for, it's a free-form month if ever there was one. Now I maybe should have thought a bit about doing Black History month early, because I'm always busy in February with affairs of the heart. I could have set something up for MLK Day next week, but of course I forgot, I was too busy trying to get from a Norwegian drama to a particular American action movie in exactly 30 steps.
Toni Collette carries over one more time from "Mafia Mamma", but now I'm all caught up with her films, so another link tomorrow to my first "destination" film of the year.
THE PLOT: A three-person crew on a mission to Mars faces an impossible choice when an unplanned passenger jeopardizes the lives of everyone on board.
AFTER: Wow, a film with just four main cast members, and that's it - seems like a breeze, although that sort of thing tends to make films HARDER to link to and from, rather than easier, as you might think. Fortunately I've planned for this, it's my last Toni Collette film for a reason, because it links to a film that I've been trying hard to get to, but it's already late on a Friday night as I type this, and I was out drinking with a friend so I'm still a little tipsy. Probably can't stay up tonight to watch a full movie, maybe I opt for sleep instead of stimulation, as we're driving out to Long Island tomorrow morning.
AFTER: Wow, a film with just four main cast members, and that's it - seems like a breeze, although that sort of thing tends to make films HARDER to link to and from, rather than easier, as you might think. Fortunately I've planned for this, it's my last Toni Collette film for a reason, because it links to a film that I've been trying hard to get to, but it's already late on a Friday night as I type this, and I was out drinking with a friend so I'm still a little tipsy. Probably can't stay up tonight to watch a full movie, maybe I opt for sleep instead of stimulation, as we're driving out to Long Island tomorrow morning.
This is fairly standard fare for trips to Mars in the movies, right? Something ALWAYS goes wrong, because if it didn't, you wouldn't have an exciting movie. Imagine a film about going to Mars where the mission runs perfectly, like clockwork, nothing breaks down, everybody on the ship gets along fine, no injuries, all of their space experiments go great, and then they get to Mars and disembark, still everything going swimmingly. How boring would THAT movie be? So, really, we know that something's going to go wrong, it's just a question about what and when. Hey, I wouldn't go to Mars anyway, in the last movie I saw about Mars there were dead zombie astronauts attacking the live ones.
"Apollo 13", "The Midnight Sky", "Alien" and "Aliens", "Moonfall", "2001 and "2010", even "Armageddon", what did they all have in common? Something goes wrong in space. It's super common, but I'm still going to stick around on Earth until something better comes along. And my bet is that this film went into production shortly after "Gravity" became a hit film.
Here the problem is one of logistics, though, it's a simple looming fact that the spacecraft headed to Mars has plenty of oxygen for three people, but the problem there is, there's an additional stowaway and that means they need air for four, and if they don't get that, then perhaps all four of them will die as a result. OK, but there's enough food for four, and that weird astronaut ice cream, but is this really a problem that can't be solved by any other methods that aren't so Draconian?
Allegedly they were seeking advice and solutions from the engineers at "Hyperion", however they didn't offer up any great solutions, other than the suicide of one person to make the trip possible for all four. But then who should be the one to make the sacrifice, if that's the best plan? Do you pull rank and just kill the one guy who's not an official astronaut, just part of the ground crew that got stuck inside? Or do you pick the oldest, the youngest, or the one who's experiment already failed (just saying....). This is one of those ethical dilemmas that is intended to make you ask a lot of questions, like "Who deserves to live?" and "Who should take one for th team" and "Why the hell did this spacecraft have such an awfully inconvenient design?"
Yes, there is more oxygen that the spacecraft can generate - but the back-up oxygen tank is in the OTHER part of the spacecraft, the one that's diametrically opposed from the cockpit, connected by these really long metal tubes and on the far side of the solar panels. Why the frick would anybody store the back-up ANYTHING in a place that's so damn hard to access. I'm sorry, but this is a NITPICK POINT of the highest order. When they pack the Space Shuttle, they put everything they're gonna need - tools, snacks, back-up beers - right where they can access it, not on the furthest point away from the door on the OUTSIDE of the shuttle. OK, so we need to fill two oxygen tanks in the most possibly FAR AWAY part of the ship, which isn't really even the same ship, it's another one a mile away that we can only access by space-walk and tethering and an abrupt change in gravity. Oh, sure, and while we're at it, let's put the space-suits in a room that you have to wear a space-suit to get to, and let's put the fire extinguishers on the outside of the ship, too, because you almost never need them inside to put out a fire.
Seriously, check out the design for the spaceship depicted in the film. It's the absolute most un-aero-dynamic craft I've ever seen. The solar wind resistance alone would ensure that this ship is never going to make it to Mars. Completely ridiculous, and also I saw the design for the new Mars lander while we were at the Johnson Space Center outside Houston in 2018. This film is super way off. The interior of this ship was about 100 times bigger than the upcoming Mars lander is going to be, but they don't really say how far in the future this is set, so who knows, maybe one day they invent space yachts after all. According to the Wiki page, they took a craft into space, and half of that launch vehicle was connected by 450-meter tethers to act as a counter-weight for inertia-based artificial gravity. I'm not buying it, it sounds phony.
The good news is that one of the ship's space experiments involves using algae to create oxygen, and I suppose that would come in very handy on Mars - but the bad news is that now they need to use that ability during the trip TO Mars, in an attempt to create more oxygen on the ship. And when that fails, the next best worst solution is to travel across those tethers and try to get the emergency oxygen from their former ship. Damn, if only someone hadn't parked it so far away...
Sure enough, a solar storm hits, whatever that is, and crossing the tethers suddenly means being exposed to deadly radiation from the sun, for which their spacesuits offer little in the way of defense. That's the real problem here, why didn't they bring the right spacesuits, the ones that would maybe protect them when they're outside in space? Cool idea, no? Why did they bring their summer outfits with the short sleeves and the Capri pants?
NITPICK POINT #2: Like many films, it appears that the astronauts still have no apparent delay in their communications with Mission Control on Earth. But if they were half-way or even a quarter of the way to Mars, I would think there would be a delay of at least a few minutes before getting a response, and a back-and-forth conversation would take longer, possibly hours.
Also starring Anna Kendrick (last seen in "A Simple Favor"), Daniel Dae Kim (last head in "Raya and the Lost Dragon"), Shamier Anderson (last seen in "Bruised").
RATING: 5 out of 10 panic attacks
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