Europa-dope

I'd heard a bit of good buzz about Europa Report, a science fiction movie from earlier this year that quietly slipped by unnoticed. It chronicles the first manned space flight beyond the moon, traveling to Jupiter's moon of Europa to investigate the possibility of microbiotic life forms beneath its icy crust. Though made on the cheap, the movie actually is slickly produced and looks quite good.

Although there's no one in the film the average person would know by name, there is a sprinkling of actors you might recognize from other places. The most likely is Sharlto Copley, the main character of District 9; his presence in this film does immediately lend it some legitimate scifi cred. There's also Christian Camargo (who played the Ice Truck Killer in the first season of Dexter), Michael Nyqvist (who originated the role in The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo which Daniel Craig portrayed in the U.S. remake), and working actors who have recurred on Mad Men, True Blood, and more.

On the plus side, the film does strive for scientific accuracy as much as possible. There are big asks of the audience, of course, but the writing overall does seek realism. There's brief archive footage of Neil deGrasse Tyson at one point; inviting his specter into the film should tell you how serious the filmmakers are about being taken seriously. Plus, the very idea of life on Europa is a real-world scientific siren, and was famously fictionalized by Arthur C. Clarke in his Space Odyssey books.

But while the movie proudly stands on the shoulders of all that, it's also influenced by a few other sources much to its detriment. The movie uses the still-not-played-out "found footage" conceit, even though you'd think that Apollo 18 would have given pause to anyone thinking to use it in this context. Worse, the movie uses a pseudo-documentary approach, having other characters occasionally (and unnecessarily) come in to narrate some of the footage, and deflating the tension in the process.

The movie also uses a jumbled narrative structure. We start with loss of communications with the mission a few months in, then jump back to its launch, then cover its arrival at Europa, then revisit the communications loss from earlier (with ensuing calamities)... it's a mess. It's not so tangled that you can't follow it, but it's generally not having the effect I think the filmmakers want it to have. Rather than building tension in the audience and making them wonder how things came to be, I found myself often a step ahead of the movie, having figured out exactly how things came to be from the not-at-all-subtle clues. I truly believe a straightforward chronological narrative would have helped this movie tremendously.

But the thing is, there are stretches (and sometimes, fairly long ones) where the movie does start to pull you in. In between the documentary voice-overs and the time jumps were sequences of 10-15 minutes that did start to work. It's just that right on the cusp of "getting good," the movie would throw it all away with ill-conceived narrative trickery. I'd grade it a C+ movie crouched teasingly on the line of B-. If it had firmly crossed it, it might be something I could truly recommend to most of you. As it stands, though, I think you have to be a space exploration junkie who doesn't mind a largely predictable movie so long as it looks good.