Another Earth: Review

Saw a movie on Netflix last night with my father, as we do every Friday night. Tonight it was Another Earth.

Short review: it sucked.

Here's my telling of it.

Summary: A girl, called Roda or something? She finds out she got a scholarship to a University. She celebrates, goes to a party. Gets drunk. Drives drunk. Hits a family - a mother, father, son. The mother and son die, the father goes into a coma. She goes to jail for four years. When she comes out, it turns out that they've discovered a second earth in our solar system - they're creatively calling it "Earth 2". You can write an essay and win a trip to Earth 2. Roda, who's always had a fascination with outer space, writes in and tries. Meanwhile, she finds out about the guy she hit those four years ago. He lives alone. She tries to ring his bell to apologize, chickens out, and tells him that she's from some sort of cleaning service. The guy buys it and actually gets her to clean his house. They bond, and eventually they have sex, even though that's kind of disgusting. NASA or whatever, they make contact with Earth 2. There are people living on it, and not only that - they're exact replicas of the people living on Earth 1. With the same names, birthdates, memories and occupations. Roda wins the trip to Earth 2. She tells the guy. They celebrate for her, then he stops pretending and begs her not to go. She tells him that she was the one that killed his entire family. He tells her to get out. She comes back, he tries to strangle her, she says stuff, and somehow or other she ends up giving her free trip to Earth 2 to him. Then as she's walking home, she sees a replica of herself - the her from Earth 2 came to Earth 1.

Now, as my father keeps saying, it told a decent story. And sure, I agree. But the telling of the story was really bad, and I'll tell you why.

First of all, we are not made to care about what happens to these characters. All we know about the girl is she's into space, and she got drunk once. All we know about the guy is his family tragedy. There is never any attempt to make us like these characters, or care what happens to them. Maybe if we saw any of the characters show emotion besides sadness, that maybe would have helped. Roda is a Bella (as in from Twilight. That bad). She's a shell. She shows no emotion besides vague sadness, and doesn't bother to interact with anyone. We didn't care. And as for the guy.... he was alright. He was alright because he actually showed a metamorphosis through the movie, as protagonists generally do. He started out very sad and directionless, then when he likes her he starts to be happy with himself again. Then, when he finds out her true identity (since "the one who killed your family" is really the only identity given her) he starts out sad, goes angry, and goes devastated. He doesn't want to hurt her. And then happy again as he goes to Earth 2. The point is, he changes through the story. And that's what a good story wants, quite often.

Second of all, the story moved SO. SLOWLY. Dad fell asleep through half of it and missed nothing significant at all. If you cut out all the stuff that doesn't move the plot at all, you'd have four minutes of movie left (okay I'm exaggerating.... but you see my point).

But here's my biggest issue; the movie focused so much on being weird, artistic and shocking that it really did sacrifice all those elements that a movie NEEDS in order to be good. The cutting in weird places and weirdly angled close-ups were quite artistic, sure, and all the rest of it. But it was focused so much on being memorably weird that it paid no attention whatsoever to more important things - things like characterization, plot development, theme. Movies should begin with a story. Stories should begin with an idea. Ideas should begin with an emotion. That's the chain as it should be. And maybe the story did have an idea, or a feeling in it. But that got completely lost when they decided that this movie should always keep you completely offbalance, and lets always have the camera cutting as if it's some kind of documentary, and let's do this over here and do that over here. It didn't need that, and frankly crumbled whatever hope I had for the movie.

Don't get me wrong, I'm fine with artistic movies. I find them fascinating. But not every movie can pull it off. Not every movie can do the whole artsy-fartsy bit and still be enjoyable. That's the problem.

But, on the other hand, there were some okay bits in this movie. Some parts of this movie were actually legitimately good. For instance, when the guy is playing the saw with a violin bow. It sounds ridiculous, but that's what happened. It was weird, but strangely drawing, and strangely pretty. And to see the Earth 2 hanging in the sky next to the moon, that was quite good. Some shots were quite striking - when Roda finds out she won, and on the dock. I very much liked that. And the story she tells the guy about the Russian astronaut and the ticking sound was something to bring shivers down your spine. But if not for these things, the movie would be nothing.

So, in general, sometimes the movie succeeded in the poetry it was obviously trying to convey - but most of the time, it was just boring and annoying. Wholly unsatisfying. Attempting to be thought provoking and really not succeeding at all.

0.5/5 stars.