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psocopteraI turned out not to like this movie for different reasons than I thought I wouldn't! Spoilery thoughts about that under the cut, after a couple of spoilery notes about content in the movie.
Content notes: animal harm (which is the one you'd never guess from the trailer), past murders committed by a parent, suicidality of a parent.
So when I first saw a trailer for this, my reaction was "oh god, a white guy in space with daddy issues, whyyy". But it turns out there was a reason it had to be a white man, more or less for the same reason Brokeback Mountain had to be about a couple of white men, because this is actually a movie about a certain kind of toxic masculinity and emotional repression, and men of color have different sets of stereotypes following them. And I thought what the first part of the movie was saying about that toxic masculinity was actually interesting, engaging the whole ice-water-for-blood astronaut trope by showing a military that deliberately cultivates and exploits it at the astronauts' expense. And also a military that's invoking the language of space exploration to cover a program of space exploitation - we see a space that's completely militarized, except the parts that are far enough from the front lines to be commercialized, and even astronauts who are described as scientists (or who mention being inspired by earlier less-military astronauts) carry weapons and behave more like soldiers than scientists. There's some good science fiction in all of that, some nicely done worldbuilding (main character "did a three year combat tour in the Arctic Circle"), some good visual gags like putting the flight attendants on the commercial moon flight in snoopy caps or a trail marker on the moon in highway-sign green and white.
Unfortunately, once the bodies of the last other characters are jettisoned and it's down to just Dude and Dad, the whole social context of the toxic masculinity gets lost, and all the character beats are purely personal. In the outer solar system there is no agency that launched Dad's mission or chose him to command it, just his own personal drive to go on it, and his abandonment of Dude eclipses his Ahab-esque dooming of his crew. (This movie is very much Heart of Darkness, but it's also Moby Dick.) Sure, fine, whatever, there are actually some good beats even here, where for a few moments these characters are just a guy trying to help his aging parent who's gotten lost in his own head. (And then some of the most ludicrous space-navigation nonsense, but whatever.) The real problem is that once Dude accelerates his way back to Earth, the movie wants to stay with this purely-personal focus by showing how his voyage has Opened His Heart, but it does that by completely dropping all the interesting stuff from the first parts of the movie. Is the military that encouraged emotional repression really going to be okay with his transformation? And they're not going to want to court-martial him for hijacking a ship and killing three people?? I get that they really wanted that landing-on-Earth scene, but the idea that space air traffic control was just like, yeah, np, land that hijacked ship, this is totally normal, was just too jarring for me to buy. If they had to have him land, I would have liked to see him doing it while, like, threatened with drones. And then we'd cut to him doing his psych-eval affirmations in an orange prison jumpsuit as a twisted-mirror version of the orange space suit, and if we absolutely *had* to have the ex-wife, have her come in to a military prison visitation room, like, he's reaching out, but he's still behind the glass of the system, because we actually remember the first 90 minutes of this movie we've been watching. Maybe he could walk past a cell that has Ruth Negga in it, showing how, yeah, they got her, but she also got to go back to Earth because of it. (We get so little of her character, but it's fascinating... the way she's born on Mars, born into the space military, which feels less like being born into royalty and more like being born into servitude, into their ownership...) Ugh, it was so close to being good! But that end was just so bad! Gah!
Content notes: animal harm (which is the one you'd never guess from the trailer), past murders committed by a parent, suicidality of a parent.
So when I first saw a trailer for this, my reaction was "oh god, a white guy in space with daddy issues, whyyy". But it turns out there was a reason it had to be a white man, more or less for the same reason Brokeback Mountain had to be about a couple of white men, because this is actually a movie about a certain kind of toxic masculinity and emotional repression, and men of color have different sets of stereotypes following them. And I thought what the first part of the movie was saying about that toxic masculinity was actually interesting, engaging the whole ice-water-for-blood astronaut trope by showing a military that deliberately cultivates and exploits it at the astronauts' expense. And also a military that's invoking the language of space exploration to cover a program of space exploitation - we see a space that's completely militarized, except the parts that are far enough from the front lines to be commercialized, and even astronauts who are described as scientists (or who mention being inspired by earlier less-military astronauts) carry weapons and behave more like soldiers than scientists. There's some good science fiction in all of that, some nicely done worldbuilding (main character "did a three year combat tour in the Arctic Circle"), some good visual gags like putting the flight attendants on the commercial moon flight in snoopy caps or a trail marker on the moon in highway-sign green and white.
Unfortunately, once the bodies of the last other characters are jettisoned and it's down to just Dude and Dad, the whole social context of the toxic masculinity gets lost, and all the character beats are purely personal. In the outer solar system there is no agency that launched Dad's mission or chose him to command it, just his own personal drive to go on it, and his abandonment of Dude eclipses his Ahab-esque dooming of his crew. (This movie is very much Heart of Darkness, but it's also Moby Dick.) Sure, fine, whatever, there are actually some good beats even here, where for a few moments these characters are just a guy trying to help his aging parent who's gotten lost in his own head. (And then some of the most ludicrous space-navigation nonsense, but whatever.) The real problem is that once Dude accelerates his way back to Earth, the movie wants to stay with this purely-personal focus by showing how his voyage has Opened His Heart, but it does that by completely dropping all the interesting stuff from the first parts of the movie. Is the military that encouraged emotional repression really going to be okay with his transformation? And they're not going to want to court-martial him for hijacking a ship and killing three people?? I get that they really wanted that landing-on-Earth scene, but the idea that space air traffic control was just like, yeah, np, land that hijacked ship, this is totally normal, was just too jarring for me to buy. If they had to have him land, I would have liked to see him doing it while, like, threatened with drones. And then we'd cut to him doing his psych-eval affirmations in an orange prison jumpsuit as a twisted-mirror version of the orange space suit, and if we absolutely *had* to have the ex-wife, have her come in to a military prison visitation room, like, he's reaching out, but he's still behind the glass of the system, because we actually remember the first 90 minutes of this movie we've been watching. Maybe he could walk past a cell that has Ruth Negga in it, showing how, yeah, they got her, but she also got to go back to Earth because of it. (We get so little of her character, but it's fascinating... the way she's born on Mars, born into the space military, which feels less like being born into royalty and more like being born into servitude, into their ownership...) Ugh, it was so close to being good! But that end was just so bad! Gah!
