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A Snail's Space

With apologies to 2011's long-forgotten "Apollo 18", "Europa Report" aims to give the sci-fi genre its very own "Blair Witch Project". Not that sci-fi (or any genre) needs one: the shaky hand-held technique is the vampire of cinematic techniques, overplayed to the point of sheer boredom. But still, as with vampires, a film can come along once in a while that can inject some life (or at least undeath) in these well-worn tropes.

Filmed with an indie sensibility, "Europa" tells the story of the first manned mission to deep space - in this case, the titular moon of Jupiter. Scientists (and James Cameron - see "Aliens of the Deep") have long suspected this distant satellite may hide organic life beneath its frozen crust. The conceit of "Report" is that a private company has invested in finding out.

A small crew is sent to take samples and drill beneath the surface. It'll take two years to get there, but it could be the most significant trip in human history, and what could possibly go wrong? Well for starters, six months in, mission control loses all communication with the Europa One craft. Months pass and communication is not established, leaving us to fear the worst. Then, months later, the footage suddenly emerges. Which brings us to "Europa Report". It's a clever idea that director Sebastián Cordero and writer Philip Gelatt unfurl with just enough nonlinear storytelling to keep you guessing (at least for a while).

What we find out is that the mission went quickly awry. Scratch that. Not quickly. Slowly. Very slowly. It's as if the plot were floating in zero gravity. That's not necessarily a bad thing. "2001: A Space Odyssey" - to which this film pays significant homage - wasn't exactly an edge-of-your-seat white-knuckler, but it had a mystery at its heart, Stanley Kubrick at the helm and the virtue of being entirely new for its time. "Europa", despite its top-notch production design (the scenes on the frozen moon are thrilling and all too brief), is in familiar territory and, while its verisimilitude is commendable for a while, eventually, like a doomed spacecraft, it simply loses forward momentum.

The ending, while a bit obvious and requiring a sudden lowering of character IQs (it seems that the world's smartest astronauts have never seen a horror movie), may still leave you with a feeling of wonder. A feeling of seeing something new, like an astronaut exploring uncharted territory. A feeling that's sorely missing from what came before.

Ironically, the filmmakers did such a good job depicting the monotony of space travel that, when they put the film together, they faced the same problem that their fictional documentary crew would have faced: how to make found footage entertaining. But a real documentary crew has the benefit of working with facts; the audience knows "Europa Report" is a movie. A sci-fi fantasy that could've used a bit more of the fantastic.