Another Earth

dir: Mike Cahill

No, it's not a movie version of the soap opera that ran for a thousand years, the only rival for the daytime soap crown against Days of Our Lives. This is Another Earth.

The five people that will see this outside of the film festival circuit and at ‘special’ screenings might argue, if they found themselves at the same coffee shop or crack house, whether this is actually a science fiction flick at all. I’m not sure myself, and I’ve had a few days to think about it.

A teenage girl with the unfortunate name of Rhoda (Brit Marling) gets drunk at a party, and, whilst drink-driving her way home, hears a news story on the radio about the discovery/appearance of a celestial body in the sky that looks a hell of a lot like Earth. She tries to spy this phenomenon in the sky, losing track of the fact that she’s meant to be watching the road.

She plows into a car, killing most of the occupants. It’s a very bad thing she’s done, no-one’s saying any different, you know, so no need to get on your high horse. She is/was a bright girl, planning on becoming an astronomer, astrophysicist or astrologer to celebrities, but now that’s all gone. Once this moment of hideous negligence occurs, that bright future she envisaged disappears in that instant.

She’s released from jail several years later. Because she did not stop for Death, no, because we did not know her prior to the accident (which happened in the first few minutes of the film), we assume she’s changed by her experiences in jail, and with her deep, deep regrets over what happened. We don’t really know how much, though, because she’s something of a blank slate, and could certainly never, ever be accused of overacting.

As she travels to and from her janitorial job, as she wanders around doing whatever maudlin things she does, this other Earth looms high in the sky, getting, I think, closer as the flick rolls on. Ever closer. The prospect, the possibility of what this other Earth represents grows more and more tantalising, more perplexing, as the more the people on the planet we’re watching find out, the stranger the whole concept becomes. An astronomer and scientist, who’s head of the SETI organisation (Search for Extra Terrestrial Intelligence), tries to communicate with this other world, and ends up speaking to another woman who’s head of that other Earth’s SETI, who seems to be exactly her, with the same life story.

Are these other people doubles? Are they another path, the path not travelled, or the path that should never, ever have been taken. ‘Us’, but a different version of us, who either doesn’t have the regrets and guilt we have, or have a whole other set of regrets and despairs due to stuff they did that we never considered.

The idea intrigues Rhoda, who clearly wonders if there’s a Rhoda on this other planet, one who didn’t get fucked up on booze before trying to drive home. One who didn’t get distracted and killed some innocent bystanders. Someone who doesn’t wish she was dead so that she didn’t have to cope with the guilt.

In this spirit, she seeks out the one survivor of the crash, being John (William Mapother). John’s pregnant wife and son died in the crash, and he was rendered comatose for months from his injuries. He takes heavy medication, and drinks a lot of booze, and seems all reclusive and such, mostly because he wears uncool beanies.

I can’t go too much more into what happens from here, not because it would spoil anything, because I can’t imagine anyone, anywhere watching this film or not based on my say so. It’s just that where the flick goes, which seems pretty obvious even to someone reading a synopsis, is a train wreck of good intentions slamming into the monolith of “well, what they hell did you think would happen?” king-hell obviousness. And I’m not sure how much it warrants picking apart.

A company with the technology to launch some kind of spacecraft runs a competition for a ticket to travel to the other earth, which these people call Earth 2. Rhoda writes an essay explaining why she should go. Earlier in the flick, Rhoda’s voiceover states that a lot of the people that became explorers, or who tested some of the limits of human experience or the frontiers of capability, didn’t do it because they were squeaky clean and noble. Many of them, in her words, were expendable fuckups, just like her. I guess she was laying the groundwork for making it seem possible that she’d be considered in such an implausible competition.

A radio commentator makes the point as to whether the other people on the other planet are likely to think of themselves as being ‘Earth 2’. For me it recalled one of the central points from Solaris, whichever version a person could sit through/endure, where someone makes the point that there is a selfish arrogance to the human drive to venture into the stars, because the vanity of humanity compels it to seek out new mirrors within which to admire only itself. In this instance, people are specifically seeking our their actual double, or opposite number, in order to figure out, I guess, whether the mistakes they’d made were avoidable, inevitable or whether anything they could have done differently could have made a difference.

It sounds like a strange issue for a sci-fi flick to get hung up on, but this doesn’t really play out like a sci-fi flick. The existence of the other Earth is often shown visually, we can’t forget about it, but the drama is entirely between Rhoda, herself and John. The other Earth allows for some kind of solution or resolution later on, way too late, but it raises more questions than it answers.

The fellow audience member I watched this with enjoyed it far more than I did, so what the hell do I know. Maybe I missed some of its inherent charms, some perhaps less obvious than others. It looks like it didn’t have much of a budget, which I’ve got zero problem with, but I think it leads to some choices in filming it that don’t always work. Some of the camerawork struck me as simultaneously amateurish and tacky at the same time.

I can relate to the main character’s struggles with her conscience only so far, and I think that became a problem for me. I don’t really have a problem with any of the acting or any of the aesthetic elements within the flick, and I kind of liked the soundtrack a fair bit. It’s just that the flick struck me as being somewhat pretentious without having the complexity or profundity it likes to think it possesses. Certain scenes where Rhoda is swanning on some beach rocks underneath the looming other Earth like she’s in a perfume/car/tampon commercial didn’t help either.

I understand regret. I understand the feeling, the irrational compulsion to try and find a way to undo the mistakes of the past. I also understand the cyclical thinking it involves, getting trapped in the past like a brain on a hamster wheel, endlessly trying to play through events and happenings in the desperate attempt to undo the undoable. Gods know I do. So at least the concept here is a powerful one.

I just don’t know about the way it plays out here, though I can appreciate the creativity and intentions of the people involved.

I will admit, though, that the final shot is an absolute pearler of a final shot. It’s a pretty amazingly strong moment, in a fairly low key movie, that will delight some and bore the fuck out of others. It’s a final shot that practically begs for an entire other movie to explain what the hell it all means.

7 times the last thing I would want to do is spend even a nanosecond in the presence of my opposite number from Earth 2, because I hate to think of the property damage that would ensue once we started kicking the shit out of each other out of 10

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“Maybe the most mysterious of all is neither the small nor the large: it's us, up close. Could we even recognize ourselves, and if we did, would we know ourselves? What would we say to ourselves? What would we learn from ourselves? What would we really like to see if we could stand outside ourselves and look at us?” – first thing I’d say is ‘get off my lawn!’ – Another Earth