Earth 2

A sort of low-budget, earthbound Contact, Mike Cahill's veraciously titled directorial debut Another Earth is about a driven, scientifically minded young woman named Rhoda (Brit Marling), who enters a contest to win a trip to a newly discovered planet. It's a depressing story at times; as a teen, Rhoda wiped out a man's family in a car accident, and she spends the rest of the movie trying to atone and getting to know the man she made a widower, John (William Mapother, in the kind of plummy lead role he should land more often). Cahill and Marling (the director and his twentysomething star wrote the screenplay together) want us to think: there has to be something "out there" that's better than the sadness of daily life here on Earth. It's exciting to see that idea explored in the realm of pure science. The moment when I knew the filmmakers had me in their grip came halfway through the movie. In a televised broadcast, a scientist discovers that the woman she's communicating with is her exact replica: an alien with the same name, same birthday, same everything. The central question of Another Earth – and it's a mind-blower – is this: If you met yourself, what would you say? This could be the most ferociously smart sci-fi indie since Primer. But, where Shane Caruth's 2004 head-spinner had grimy visuals throughout, Cahill's equally ambitious picture is technically dazzling, especially in the repeated shots of "another Earth" dwarfing our moon. This is easily one of the coolest movies I've seen this year, not least because Cahill and Marling save their most surprising revelation for the final few seconds.

Spring sci-fi roundup

I’d planned on posting about how the spring movie season marked the return of smart, satisfying science-fiction to the big screen. Then I saw Limitless; BIG disappointment. Still, the fact that three ideas-driven sci-fi movies performed respectably at the box office – all in the same one-month period – certainly qualifies as a resurgence of some sort. Each of these movies has a charismatic lead performance, an impossibly gorgeous young actress to gawk at, and something thought-provoking to say about the way we live in the 21st century. Reviewed in the order I saw them:

While watching The Adjustment Bureau, George Nolfi’s ridiculous (but strangely captivating) sci-fi/romance, I was reminded of Richard Kelly’s much-derided 2009 release, The Box. Both movies are based on short stories by celebrated SF writers (Philip K. Dick in the case of The Adjustment Bureau, Richard Matheson in the case of The Box), and both are about Men in Hats conducting grand experiments on the human race. I find myself returning to The Box quite often; the movie is inscrutable but atmospheric and never dull, and the score (composed by Win Butler and Regine Chassagne of Arcade Fire) is a super-cool homage to Bernard Hermann. Is Kelly’s movie all that more ludicrous than Nolfi’s, in which Matt Damon asks a mystery dude in a fedora, “Are you an angel?” At any rate, I was more enamored by Damon’s chemistry with Emily Blunt than by the faith-based sermon on free will that The Adjustment Bureau ultimately serves up. It’s a decidedly gooey, sentimental piece of sci-fi, but also an irresistible one – the cinematic equivalent of a big bear hug.

As mentioned earlier, the impact of Limitless is limited. It’s about an aspiring writer (Bradley Cooper) who discovers a miracle drug that gives him superhuman intelligence. Sounds like the recipe for a trippy, speculative cautionary tale about addiction and modern medicine, right? Instead, we get a weak narrative about stock market trading that’s about as much fun to watch as Atlas Shrugged is to read. You end up wondering what a young David Cronenberg might have done with this material. Director Neil Burger demonstrates some ingenuity with the “infinite zoom” shots, which, as the filmmaker has said, create the effect that you’re “rushing through the city streets but not at high speed – you are at an infinite zoom, moving relentlessly at real time but faster than everyone around you.” As others have said, this effect is “nauseating”.

After showing great promise with The Illusionist, Burger has failed to live up to his potential in recent years. (Like Limitless, 2008’s The Lucky Ones was a major letdown). In contrast, Duncan Jones just keeps getting better and better. After Moon and now Source Code (his first two feature films, if you can believe that), he just might be the best sci-fi director working today. Easily one of the best films of 2011, Source Code stars Jake Gyllenhaal as Capt. Colter Stevens, a war vet assigned to find the bomber of a Chicago-bound train. To do this, he must repeat the same eight minutes on a loop (and get blown to bits each time he fails to identify the perpetrator). With its zeitgeist-y terror plot, sexy stars (Michelle Monaghan plays Gyllenhaal’s love interest) and twisty script, the movie is an absolute winner from first scene to last. How much do you want to bet that Jones (the son of David Bowie, if you can believe that) knocks Moon 2 out of the park?

"Paul"

In Paul, Greg Motolla’s new high-concept alien comedy, Seth Rogen plays a wisecracking, pot-smoking visitor from the Andromeda galaxy. If that premise sounds terrible, then you’ll probably want to steer clear. Your enjoyment of this movie is almost entirely dependent on whether you like its star’s personality, though I can’t imagine any science-fiction fan not having at least a little bit of fun.

The film reunites Simon Pegg and Nick Frost, the dynamic British duo from Shaun of the Dead and Hot Fuzz. They play Graeme and Clive, two aging fanboys who embark on a tour of the U.S. after attending Comic Con. The script – co-written by Pegg and Frost, former roommates who grew up loving Star Wars – is an affectionate skewering of comic-book culture. There’s an air of self-parody to the Ewok T-shirts and geeky film references.

The adventure begins when Graeme and Clive meet Paul, an alien visitor who’s just escaped from the U.S. government after decades of captivity. The extraterrestrial has Rogen’s distinctive, laidback-stoner voice, but the big guy is never physically in the movie; this is a completely digital creation, like Gollum and Jar-Jar Binks. Actor Joe Lo Truglio studied tapes of Rogen and delivered the lines on set, and then Rogen recorded the dialogue in post-production. The effect is like seeing a Seth Rogen performance while never actually seeing Seth Rogen.

If Paul looks a little, uh, familiar – little green dude, big eyes, bald head – it’s because, as the alien explains, “the human race has been drip-fed images of my face on lunchboxes and T-shirts in case our species meet you don’t have a spaz attack.” This concept – that Paul has had a hand, Forrest Gump-style, in the shaping of post-war American history – gives the filmmakers a license to tickle our funny bone. Paul claims he came up with the idea for E.T. and Agent Mulder of The X-Files, and says the weed he gets from the Pentagon killed Dylan…

Graeme: Bob Dylan isn’t dead!
Paul: *knowing smile* Isn’t he?

I was surprised by the degree to which the filmmakers got me emotionally involved. Paul is not only funny, he’s endearing; his eyes make a cute little squishy sound when he blinks. Mottola, Pegg and Frost embrace Spielbergian sentimentality, and they mostly get away with it, even though David Arnold’s music lays it on a bit thick for my taste. There's a healthy dose of subversiveness to go along with the sentiment. This is the second British invasion comedy in recent years to take an explicitly pro-atheist stance. The other is The Invention of Lying, and if that film isn’t as well made as Paul, it’s equally astonishing and audacious.

Paul has the power to transfer all his knowledge of the universe just by reaching out and touching someone. This ability comes in handy when he meets Ruth (Kristen Wiig), a creationist who believes the Earth is 4,000 years old. (She wears a T-shirt depicting Jesus shooting Charles Darwin in the head.) Ruth has the most complex character arc in the movie, and Wiig makes the most of it; she brings genuine poignancy to the moment near the end of the film when Ruth tells Paul, “You didn’t frighten me, you freed me.”

Sci-fi fans will have a lot of fun picking out references to Alien, Close Encounters of the Third Kind and Back to the Future, and even those who don’t enjoy Rogen’s performance (for the record, I like the guy just fine) will have plenty to appreciate in the acting department. Mottola (The Daytrippers, Superbad, Adventureland) is one of our greatest directors of ensemble comedies, and he’s surrounded his digitally rendered main character with a cast of likeable performers – including Bill Hader, Jeffrey Tambor, Jane Lynch and Blythe Danner. You gotta love the moment when Danner’s character, seeing that her farm is being destroyed in a fire, cries out, “My weed!”

"Monsters"

Like District 9, Gareth Edwards’ Monsters is a monster movie that takes place several years after aliens have landed on Earth. District 9 had a budget of $30 million; Monsters cost a fraction of that ($500,000), but you wouldn’t know by looking at it. The movie is a masterpiece of economy filmmaking and a prime example of just how much a resourceful independent filmmaker can accomplish these days.

The movie takes place in a speculative near-future, when the entire northern part of Mexico has been quarantined and the U.S.-Mexico border has been sealed with a fortified wall to keep out extraterrestrial “creatures”. A war photographer (Scoot McNairy) is paid a hefty sum to escort a wealthy American expatriate (Whitney Able) from Central America back to the States. To complete the journey, they must travel through the Infected Zone, where alien behemoths that look like elephants crossed with squids roam freely.

Like Robert Rodriguez, Edwards is a multi-hyphenate filmmaker. Traveling with his two lead actors and a 5-man crew, he shot the movie himself in Costa Rica, Mexico, Guatemala and Belize. He filmed in flooded areas and disasters zones, including a neighborhood in Galveston, Texas, that had been destroyed by Hurricane Ike. Like the great documentarians, Edwards knows how to make the most of his surroundings. The landscape looks like it’s been ravaged by alien invaders, but no, the filmmakers simply shot on location in areas that suited their purposes.

Even more astonishing is what Edwards achieved during post-production. Using readily available computer programs like Photoshop and Adobe After Effects, he painted in helicopters, road signs, mountains and a towering border fence. In an amazing nighttime scene, a sea creature pulls a downed plane beneath the surface; the effects in that scene were accomplished in the director’s bathtub using a toy plane and a Mag-Lite. The design of the creatures is jaw-dropping. Whereas Steven Spielberg delayed showing the monster in Jaws because he thought the shark looked fake, Edwards shows the creatures right away, in a stunning roadside attack that opens the film. Monsters shows how far visuals effects technology has advanced in the 35 years since Spielberg’s creature-feature blockbuster.

Able and McNairy have good chemistry (they’re married in real life), but the real star is Edwards. No wonder why he’s been hired to direct the new big-budget reboot of Godzilla. His low-budget indie can be viewed as a straight monster movie or as an allegory for immigration and the devastating effects of natural disasters in the Third World’s most vulnerable areas. It’s no big surprise that the “monsters” to which the title refers turn out to be entirely human.