Tag: Spaceship

Aniara

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

An elevator to the stratosphere winches passengers up from Earth to the docked spaceship Aniara. The interplanetary passenger liner is effectively a gigantic shuttle taking people to Mars to begin a new life. As the journey can be mentally traumatic, Aniara has an on board facility called Mima, a room / interface into which users plug themselves to relive old memories. Both interface and its human client group are looked after by a facilitator called the Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson). The clients lie down with their heads resting on something that looks like a neck brace and experience, say, a forest in Spring with a fresh brook running through it, “the Earth as it used to be”.

Early in the journey to Mars, Aniara hits space’s equivalent of an air pocket: the ship tilts and, for a short time, everything on board is total chaos. Then things return to normal. Only, they don’t.

Eventually, the captain announces over the ship’s large screen video, public address system that Aniara swerved to avoid a fatal collision with an asteroid. The passengers and crew are very lucky to be still alive. The manoeuvre also involved jettisoning all the ship’s fuel. Now Aniara is drifting having been knocked off course – not a problem since once it approaches a nearby planet or other celestial body, the crew can use the planet’s gravitational field to slingshot themselves back on course. However as the Mimaroben’s world-weary, astronomer room mate (Anneli Martini) points out to her, the ship isn’t going anywhere near any such planets or bodies. So they’re just drifting through space with little likelihood of either reaching Mars or being rescued.

What follows, unusually and refreshingly for an sci-fi film ostensibly about space travel, is a study of a self-enclosed society in crisis as it moves from a consumerist passenger liner model to something much more prescriptive and co-operative. Food production shifts to algae-based crops which may provide a less pleasant diet but nevertheless ensures all the ship’s the population are adequately and healthily fed.

As more and more people want to use Mima as a form of temporary respite from the ship’s seemingly hopeless predicament, the facility eventually reaches a point where it can no longer cope with the client numbers and breaks under the strain. Accused of shutting down the now inoperable system, the Mimaroben is moved to more menial tasks.

Despite her initiating the occasional unsatisfactory sexual encounter with a male pickup, the Mimaroben’s main romantic interest is to be found in a pilot named Isagel (Bianca Cruzeiro) with whom she eventually moves in and forms a household. This works for the two of them, at least for a while, but elsewhere on the ship the social tension becomes more and more strained. Fundamentalist quasi-religious cults arise, their dubious practices involving gathering for mass orgiastic rituals, partly for the purposes of procreation. Meanwhile, the marginalised Mimaroben may have a long term solution to all the unrest: she harbours a dream of building a VR display of sorts outside the ship to show images to the population in order to help them cope with their situation.

It’s never discussed exactly what has befallen planet Earth, but images of conflagration jostle with Mima’s ‘past’ imagery of healthy woodlands and fresh running water suggesting global warming has taken its toll. Crew notwithstanding, the implication is that everyone on the ship possesses sufficient financial resources to buy their way out. When disaster occurs, their bubble of self-preservation is burst and they enter into a sort of social free-fall where anything goes. Perhaps the piece overreaches itself a little with its religious orgies which play out as compelling spectacle even as you half wonder exactly what they’re doing in the narrative. Otherwise, though, it’s impressive as a piece of sci-fi, refreshingly intelligent as a portrait of a society in crisis. Overall, it’s wholly fascinating.

Aniara is out in the UK on Friday, August 30th. On VoD in March. Watch the film trailer below:

Meerkat Moonship (Meerkat Maantuig)

Posted on by Jeremy Clarke

Teenager Gideonette de la Rey (Anchen du Plessis) doesn’t like her name. In fact, our protagonist is convinced her unusual moniker carries a curse. Her father, the pastor of a small church, he assures her there’s no such curse. But then one day he’s found dead in the church building.

Gideonette is obsessed with the curse and begins writing a list of ways it might cause her to die. Her alcoholic mother (Hanlé Barnard) finds out and forbids her from looking at the list.

When her mother checks herself into a hospital “for some rest”, Nettie, as she prefers to be called, moves in with her grandparents Willem (Pierre van Pletzen) and Koekie (Rika Sennett) whose farmhouse is surrounded by countryside where she meets a younger boy Bhubesi (Themba Ntuli), a mute, who with the help of her grandfather is building a giant spaceship in the shape of a meerkat so that he can blast off into the stars…

The above probably sounds completely bonkers. But it’s really hard to do this film justice simply by talking about its plot. So much else is going on, not least the exquisite cinematography which lend many of Nettie’s scenes, some of them walking through vegetation in sunlight, an ethereal dreamlike quality.

This is a film about coming to terms with your past and letting go of fear in order to move forward. And then there’s the fact that this is a South African movie set in a loosely defined time presumably while the country was still under Apartheid, in which this writer, for one, kept wondering where all the black people were.

Well, the mute Bhubesi is black, as his briefly seen mum, and while the white Nettie’s relationship with him is quite odd, it doesn’t seem to be so much about race as about friendship for someone who needs a helping hand. Which both these characters do in their differing ways.

For the finale, all the hitherto hidden black people finally appear alongside the white Nettie and her grandparents with a feeling of different colour skinned people getting along together and moving forward. And of Nettie finding herself in this new context. A wonderfully and thoroughly subversive little film which deserves to be widely seen.

Meerkat Moonship played in the Schlingel International Film Festival where it deservedly picked up the Fipresci jury prize.

Spaceship

Posted on by victorfraga

This is a gentle, warm and soothing movie, some sort of journey into the dreamy world of a teenage girl. There are nuclear rainbows, unicorns and giant babies flying around. And everything is colourful: from the blue dyed hair of a friend to the clothes, the walls and lights beaming from the sky. Welcome to the strangely charming world of the cyber-goth Lucidia, played here by the beautiful Alexa Davies.

There’s also sadness and mourning infused in all the bright colours and lights. The teenager lost her mother seven years earlier in a swimming pool accident, although it’s never entirely clear what really happened. Her father Gabriel (Antti Reini) is still struggling to move on, and he remains partly alienated from his daughter. He often makes utterances and speaks to himself in Finnish, emphasising his estrangement from those surrounding him. When Lucidia fakes her own abduction by aliens, he is forced to engage with her exotic friends obsessed with mythical creatures and outer space action.

Spaceship is narrated from multiple perspectives, and the story isn’t entirely linear. It’s willfully disjointed, like the mind of the highly imaginative teen. The fast editing, fragmented dialogues and kaleidoscopic montage contribute to a strange feeling of alienation. Conversations about the limits of reality and illusion serve to confirm that not everything in the film is quite what it seems. Both adults and teenagers are searching for a greater purpose, and they are unable to relate to each other along their journey.

Supported by an indie soundtrack from lesser-known artists, Spaceship is overall a pleasant experience. It feels a little bit like a film made for a music album by Saint Etienne: essentially British, fun, easy digestible and calming. It also feels very feminine in its sensitivity and abstractness, despite being directed by a man (Alex Taylor). But not everything is perfect. The manneristic aesthetics subdue the storyline. There’s a very interesting twist in the end, and yet that gets a little diluted in the incandescent lights, fluorescent paint and luminescent clothes. Sometimes it feels you are walking inside the Cyberdog store in Camden instead of watching a film.

This is not the only recent British film about difficulties that different generations have to communicate. The superb The Levelling (Hope Dickson Leach, 2017) also deals with the topic, if from a much less abstract and dreamy perspective.

Spaceship was out in cinemas in May, and it was made available on all major VoD platforms on July 10th.