Europa Report
Directed By Sebastian Cordero(2013)
I went into Europa Report expecting the umpteenth variation on Alien, thanks to the Netflix description. Films like 1985's Creature, to Event Horizon (1997) have used this well-worn alien-hunting-astronaut plot to death. I wasn't expecting much from Europa Report, but it did surprise me.
The film entails a doomed group of astronauts heading to Jupiter's moon Europa following studies suggesting it has water and can support life (which real-life scientists claim is certainly possible.) The crew does find life, but when an astronaut loses her life investigating it, the crew is spooked and leaves. Unable to escape the planetoid, it crashes back down. One by one the crew dies...
Instead of duping Alien, Europa Report apes the earliest atomic-age sci-fi films like Destination Moon and Rocketship X-M. Those films also featured astronauts exploring and encountering the unknown in our solar system as well. Instead of being a dated copy, it expands and modernizes those classic genre films.
We're told upfront the mission is a disaster. The film is told using on-board cameras and the occasional filmed interview, giving the film the definite reality TV feel, for better and worse. Being a fierce opponent of the lowest genre TV has ever developed, the reality TV invasion into the film made me groan at first, but it made the situation seem far less theatrical and somehow added to the realism and suspense... something that, on TV, adds to the phoniness.
Acting is uniformly strong. The extremely dry early 1950s performances are absent, giving way to more realistic portrayals. The script, however, gives the characters little time to develop, but they seem like real people, far from robotic acting in films like Destination Moon. It also eschews the dated views toward women astronauts in those earlier films, that certainly wouldn't fly today. The women on this ship aren't there just for cooking and screaming.
Some of the actors may be slightly recognizable, but there are no big names that may distract from the proceedings. I couldn't help but be distracted thinking of Gravity's Sandra Bullock floating away into space when the first astronaut to die met a similar fate... in a far less maudlin way.
For an obvious low-budget production, the special effects are decent, though the brief scenes of the surface of Europa are very low-res and make it look like it's from a video game. The insides of the ship still have the "make it look sciencey" design of the 50s films... with a little 2001 thrown in for good measure. Still, like District 9, low budget effects + set design don't hurt the film at all.
Europa Report offers nothing particularly original to the sci-fi genre but it is a well put-together film and is worth a look.
Posts
