Running Time: 1 hour, 32 minutes
Rating: PG-13
Director: Mike Cahill
Quick Impressions:
This movie would have been better as a music video. As interested as I am in genre theory, I rarely have revelations of this kind. I don’t think that I’ve ever once read a novel and lamented, “Why, oh why, isn’t this a cookbook instead?” But I’m just being honest. Another Earth is a very effective music video masquerading as a relatively low budget feature film.
Think about it. When you watch a music video, you think, What a beautiful image! That’s so surreal! There’s another Earth hanging above her in the sky, right next to the moon. Hey listen to the lyrics! They’re not really saying anything about the other Earth or why it doesn’t affect the tides. The lyrics are about a Russian cosmonaut choosing to hear an annoying noise as music. But who’s that on the screen? It’s not a Russian cosmonaut. It’s a girl walking through the snow. Now she’s driving a car. Oh, but she’s going kind of fast…
In a music video, the disparate elements aren’t supposed to have a linear relationship. Instead, they all function separately, each tangential to a powerful, central metaphor. When you watch the video, you drink in all these disparate elements at once, and you come away with an appreciation for the beauty they create in concert. Maybe you can’t put your finger on it, but you sense a deeper meaning, one that works on every sense to create an artistic profundity that can’t be reduced to a pithy apothegm.
What a magnificent music video Another Earth could have been! But it’s trying to be a movie.
Sometimes you watch a movie in limited release and think, Why aren’t the multiplexes showing more films like this? The quality is so much better than some of the wider, commercial releases! Mainstream audiences would love this movie if only they could see it!
This is not the case here.
Mainstream audiences would not like this movie. There’s much to love about it. And as a piece of art, it’s quite beautiful. Some of the themes it explores are deeply intriguing. But as a movie, it’s not very good, not very satisfying. And I personally would also say that as a piece of art, it’s not quite as profound as it thinks it is. (As I said before, it has the heavy-handed self-importance of a music video. I think the director should start making music videos.)
The Good:
I hardly know what to say in praise of Another Earth because its strength lies in the richness of its symbolism, imagery, and metaphor. But if I discuss any of these aspects in depth, I feel like I’ll spoil the movie. From a narrative perspective, so little happens. The real reward of watching the movie is making these interpretive discoveries.
I will say that I think the key to understanding this movie lies in the opening scene, when Rhoda shows first the static image of the surface of Jupiter, and then the dynamic scene of the images in rapid succession. Any static image is never going to be as rewarding or exciting as the possibility offered by change and forward progress.
Another major (really major) point the movie makes centers on two related questions: 1) If another Earth appeared overhead in the sky, how would it change your life? 2) When you are intently focused on a portion of your past that you can’t seem to let go of, what would it take to make you look up, look away? If another Earth appeared in the sky, would it even make a difference?
The acting in the movie is also good, though not so remarkable that I expect to hear any of the performers names mentioned again during awards season. I particularly liked Robin Taylor as Rhoda’s little brother, Jeff, and Kumar Pallana as fellow custodian Purdeep.
The music is also beautiful. It’s really lovely.
More than anything, I think this movie dances around a very intriguing idea about the nature of forgiveness. I wish that the story had been a bit more focused, and that the ending had resolved more. The existence of the other Earth seemed like a contrivance to end the story quickly. What happened with John and Rhoda was predictable (painful, but predictable). What wasn’t predictable was what would happen next. But the movie chose to side-step providing any genuine closure. I do think I understand what the movie was saying. I just think it could have said more.
The Negatives:
The pacing of the movie is absolutely painful. I can’t call it bad pacing because almost nothing happens, so how can no events even have pacing? Everything that’s going to happen in the movie happens in the first five minutes. In that way, it’s a lot like Crime and Punishment. Pretty much the only thing that actually happens is Rhoda’s unintentional crime. For the rest of the movie, we watch her punishment, her self-torturing quest for atonement and meaning. Well, Crime and Punishment is a great novel. I’ve read it many times and never gotten sick of it. But how many Hollywood blockbuster film adaptations of Crime and Punishment have there been? Even successful TV adaptations have changed the story quite a bit.
Normally, you go to a movie expecting a driving narrative. Film lends itself to narrative because the audience has to experience it in a certain order. A movie isn’t a painting that you can approach from a number of different directions at varying times of the day as the whim strikes you. You must watch it from start to finish.
The movie raises so many interesting themes, concepts, problems, metaphors, motifs. You’ll want to gather a bunch of snobby friends and discuss all of these little gems at length. But there’s a catch! First, you have to wait for the movie to be over! And it really, really takes its time.
Of course, on the flip side, poignant images from the movie will come back to you. Questions and curiosities will occur to you long after you’ve seen it. You’ll wake up in the middle of the night three days later with an image of the storms on Jupiter blazoned into your mind’s eye. (In fact, while writing this review and making an off-hand comparison to Crime and Punishment, I’ve noticed that the protagonist’s name, Rhoda, sounds an awful lot like Rodia.)
On the whole, I thought the concept of “another Earth” was great for providing a captivating visual image of some of the ideas that haunt the protagonist. The thing is, since the other Earth is a part of everyone’s reality and not just a figment of her imagination (something that she pretends about, dreams, paints, writes poems about), you’d expect it to function as more than an image. But it doesn’t. I realize that by making a statement like this, I’m going to provoke a response that I don’t “get” the movie, but I have to say it.
Rhoda lives right on the beach. Surely the appearance of another Earth would cause some kind of cataclysmic consequences. It’s been coming closer and closer to our Earth very rapidly, first appearing as a blip in the night sky, and then suddenly visible during the day just four years later. Um? Rhoda went to jail instead of college. Her whole life was turned upside down. But the whole world should have been turned upside down! At the very least, I’d expect floods! And what exactly is going to happen to this other Earth? Why has it stopped moving closer, or is it still moving closer? Is it going to collide with our Earth?
I know the movie isn’t about astronomical reality, but here’s the thing that bugs me. Rhoda is a scientist. She’s obsessed with outer space. She had been accepted to MIT. Had Rhoda been a poet or an artist—but she’s an astronomer!
I know the movie gets around this by taking a very high-handed tone and practically screaming, “Well, I’m trying to be artistic!” I would reply (in this imagined conversation with the movie happening inside my head), “But you’re a MOVIE!”
If the movie were just a series of images with no semblance of a narrative, then perhaps these things would be forgivable. But the movie does attempt to tell a story. It just does it very, very poorly.
Now the story is kind of beautiful. But it’s been done before. The idea of self-torture and atonement for a mistake has been done before and done much better.
At the movie’s heart, you have a story about an adolescent who makes a mistake, a story I identified with very deeply. When you’re set to go to MIT, and suddenly you end up back home in your parents’ attic because of a mistake you made, you feel like you have to start doing janitorial work. I am not being sarcastic at all when I say that I totally understand that.
I just think that the other Earth is a gimmick to get this moving-but-not-very-original little story a place on the big screen. And that’s fine. But I think it’s a cheap trick and wastes the potential of the story that could have been so excellent as either a drama about atonement or a science fiction film with the same themes that it has but a better-paced and more coherent story.
This movie is a piece of something excellent trying to stand on its own.
When considering seeing it, think about this—would you rather see a fragment of a sketch by DaVinci or an entire comic book panel by any currently employed graphic artist?
Basically, with Another Earth you’re getting the Mona Lisa’s left arm. If you’re okay with that, then you’ll be happy you’ve chosen it over movies that offer more closure but less artistry.
I’m aware that other people will disagree, and I’m not trying to detract from the beauty of what it expresses, but I watched the movie and saw wasted potential. Too many summer blockbusters that make it to the multiplexes fall short of greatness because they’re not trying to say anything important. This movie has something to say, but it uses an ineffective medium for conveying its message. Some people will probably call this movie great. I think it has the potential to be great but is underdeveloped, which is kind of sad. And I thought the very last scene was particularly gimmicky, almost to the point of being annoying.
Best Scene Visually:
The opening scene showing the storms on Jupiter is the most important—clearly, they show it to you again when Rhoda hears John’s song. This movie is dripping with symbolism. (It’s like the people who made it forgot to include anything else.) Rhoda’s footprints in the snow are another nice image, and the scene when she strips naked while staring at the other Earth and contemplating her lack of a future also plays well.
Best Scene:
I liked Rhoda’s anecdote about the Russian cosmonaut, although as the person suffering from the headache induced by brain trauma and too much activity in the sunlight, I think I would have knocked her upside the head for drawing out the story so long while actually making that annoying noise. But then again, the movie is kind of like that anecdote. It makes a lovely point—if it works for you—but in the meantime you’ve got to suffer through a protracted narrative and a generally uncomfortable experience.
Best Surprise:
I loved what happened to Purdeep (I mean from the point of view of someone longing for character-driven narrative). It was infinitely more interesting than what was happening with that stupid other Earth. (And while I do think that was the point, I still wish the movie had either explored the twin Earth concept more realistically or dropped it.)
The Performances:
I liked Brit Marling as Rhoda Williams, but not enough. I thought that the character had such an interesting part and far more screen time than anyone else in the movie. Marling played the role capably, but it was such a big part that someone could have played it very memorably. Marling’s performance isn’t bad, but it’s just kind of average. I feel her pain, but I’m not sure that I care.
William Mapother was very convincing as John Burroughs, a character who has terrible luck. You can’t help but feel sorry for this man. It’s like he’s caught in a Greek tragedy of someone else’s devising.
Robin Taylor was great as Rhoda’s brother, Jeff, one of the most intriguing and underdeveloped characters in the movie. Taylor’s is the one performance that makes me curious to learn more about the actor, who clearly has talent.
I thought I recognized Kumar Pallana as Rhoda’s fellow custodian, Purdeep. I thought he was a wonderful character, and Pallana played him quite convincingly.
The other standout was Diane Ciesla as Dr. Joan Tallis. Her scene was well-played and seemed so surreal and creepy partially because of her strong performance.
Overall:
Another Earth is in many ways beautiful, and certainly it’s a great film for starting conversations that could well become deeply meaningful. The music in the movie is beautiful, and it certainly explores human relationships and mechanisms such as grief, atonement, guilt, forgiveness, acceptance, enlightenment, despair, and hope. I suppose it just disappointed me because I think it could have retained all of its positive qualities and also offered a more satisfying story.
Another Earth hanging around in the sky is distracting, and as often as it creates wonderful imagery and symbolism, it even more often creates a way for the filmmakers to sidestep fully exploring any of the issues the film examines. If you go expecting a science fiction movie, you will probably hate it. Instead, it’s the kind of film that creates a surreal situation in which to examine the consequences of our actions and reactions. It’s beautiful, all right, and it’s compelling and tragic and true, but I think it could have been more. It could have been beautiful and compelling and tragic and true and entertaining and satisfying.