Another Earth [Sundance '11]

[modage]

Director: Mike Cahill
Cast: William Mapother, Brit Marling, Jordan Baker, Robin Lord Taylor, Flint Beverage
Writers: Mike Cahill, Brit Marling

In ANOTHER EARTH, Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), a bright young woman accepted into MIT's astrophysics program, aspires to explore the cosmos. A brilliant composer, John Burroughs (William Mapother), has just reached the pinnacle of his profession and is about to have a second child. On the eve of the discovery of a duplicate Earth, tragedy strikes and the lives of these strangers become irrevocably intertwined.

Trailer: http://trailers.apple.com/trailers/fox/anotherearth/

[socketlevel]

sigh...

[RegularKarate]

sigh...

what does this mean?  it could mean either positive or negative.
Is this a placeholder so that when the movie comes out and people make up their minds about what they thought of the movie, you can go back and say "see?  I said it first, 'SIGH'... I knew before everyone else"?

[socketlevel]

naw lol, i stick by my posts and in the case i go back on it I'll be the first to admit it.

I'm sighing at the concept, not the execution. for all i know, this could be a great movie.  The sigh comes from the didactic attempt at being philosophical. This is really what American art cinema encompasses these days. Everything about it seems so obvious. The attempt to make a literal science fiction representation of what is going on in the protagonist's head is laughable. In as much as the modern action movie is for a retarded simple minded audience, this seems to be for a retarded simple minded alternative audience. No sense of subtlety. Even though it seems to have a gentle tone, the only tool in the toolbox is a sledge hammer in other ways. You know, just in case we lose a couple people somewhere along the journey.

LVTs film will be compared to this in many ways i'm sure.

[Ghostboy]

There is one really, really great scene in the film and it's the first one in the trailer, with the woman on TV. That scene, in its full form, nails the chills and the wonder and the reactiveness to something that is truly out out of this world and brings it (no pun intended) down to earth.

The rest of the movie is not great. It's wrapped up succinctly in the 'story' told in the trailer. Brit Marling is really, really good, and elevates the material, but William Mapother does not. It's a pretty obvious story, and socketlevel hit the nail exactly on the head about the sledgehammer approach.

I still hope it does well, just to justify the money spent acquiring it, so that distributors won't be burned out next year at Sundance.

[modage]

Agree totally with Ghostboy, it's a major bait-and-switch.  I'm surprised Fox Searchlight bought this instead of like, Magnolia/Magnet or something.  I suspect people interested in the concept will walk out pretty frustrated they just saw a movie with 40 minutes of regretful housecleaning in it.

My Mini-Review from Sundance:

"Another Earth" won the Alfred P. Sloan Prize, given to a film that focuses on science or technology as a theme, and was one of 30+ films bought during festival. The story takes place in the near future as mankind learns of a duplicate planet Earth in our solar system which is supposedly an identical planet to our own including another "you." The question of what to do if you met your other self, or in what ways they might be different is idea that strings you along through the film. Frustratingly, this philosophical idea and most of the science and technology hangs mostly in the background of the picture. The bulk of the film centers on the relationship between a guilt ridden young woman (Brit Marling) and a man who has been struck by tragedy (William Mapother). Much of the film is a slow moving grief drama, with the carrot of science fiction dangled just out of frame. Marling, who co-wrote the script, is good in the film but Mapother, (best known for playing creepy Ethan on "Lost") doesn't quite have the range for this character. Anyone frustrated by last year's bait-and-switch "Monsters" will likely find themselves feeling the same way here. [C]

[pete]

god. I kinda really crave a science fiction that is in the old sense of the genre - something that inspires wonders and examines the human condition, as opposed to special effects and action sequences. Moon really hit the spot for me, though I know there were others out there not entirely satisfied with it. Seeing the LVT trailer and this one made me think that maybe the indie crowd would be down to give the revival a shot, but from the reviews, it still sounds like we've got our work cut out for us.
There are also a few time traveling movies here and there that seemed to be doing something interesting, but Moon so far has been the only baton holder. The sci-fi genre really needs a revival. Hollywood bifurcates geeks from dramatists way too neatly and it's hard for interesting concepts to cross over to the realm of crackling dialogue and good stories. HELP.

[socketlevel]

I actually really liked monsters because it wasn't what I'm worried this will be. It wasn't high concept with simple analogies, and when the climax scene in the film came I found the philosophy quite rewarding. Like i said, maybe this film will have that as well but the "point" of this film seems to be given away at the onset.

[socketlevel]

"Marling, who co-wrote the script, is good in the film but Mapother, (best known for playing creepy Ethan on "Lost") doesn't quite have the range for this character.

I will always remember him for "In the bedroom"

[Ghostboy]

For what it's worth, I liked MONSTERS a lot.

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

As long as we're off topic, I'd like to ask who has seen Douglas Trumbull's Brainstorm from 1983, a sci-fi film that I just heard about and is maybe less well known than his other directorial effort Silent Running, but maybe not because so much of life is circumstantial encounter and whatnot, but anyway I recently heard some great things about Brainstorm.  Its title yields 0 relevant results from the Xixax search engine.

[matt35mm]

I haven't seen this, but I saw Sound of My Voice, the other Brit Marling movie (she co-wrote and stars in that one, too) that played at Sundance and SXSW and I liked that a lot. From everything I've heard, the consensus is that Sound of My Voice is much better than Another Earth. I'm not sure why Another Earth was bought right away, but Sound of My Voice finally picked up distribution (also through Fox Searchlight) either yesterday or today. That one is worth seeking out.

[socketlevel]

Brainstorm is good, I haven't seen it in like 8 or so years but i remember liking it. I remember reading something about it somewhere... being slightly disappointed with the execution of the ending, almost like it was tacked on or heavily edited from something that was much more controversial. It just felt like the studio came in and changed it to give it the gay ending treatment. Studios were notorious around that time for doing that.

I'm a nerd when it comes to screenplay forewards as I've mentioned in other threads. Bruce Joel Rubin's recounting of the writing process and ultimate production of "Jacob's ladder" is great. He does a career spanning confessional in that book. Rubin wrote a screenplay called "the George dunlap tape" which became "Brainstorm". in the book he also tells the story of the making of Wes Craven's "deadly friend" which was originally called "friend" about a boy who's girlfriend dies and he reanimates her with a computer. It was suppose to be a coming of age story, but when the studio saw it they hired a bunch of new people and forced Craven to shoot new footage which basically made the girlfriend turn evil. going against the entire point of the original story. So Rubin's been fucked a few times.

EDIT- I picked up the screenplay and gave it another read:

he writes about Deadly Friend, "Ultimately, in the end, the film was a failure. Audiences did not want a sensitive human drama from Wes craven. they wanted blood. after test audiences rebelled against his more human portrayal, the studio instructed us to add six scenes of escalating carnage. the title of the film was changed from friend to deadly friend, and most people associated with it were embarrassed by what it had become."

and on brainstorm: "...I got a phone call from the writers guild. they were going to arbitrate the writing credit for brainstorm and it was possible that i could end up with no credit for the film at all. i found that unbelievable. while i knew that none of my dialogue had survived the final drafts of the script, the original story and concepts for the film were clearly mine... i was told that unless i volunteered to accept a "story by" credit and give "screenplay" credit to my friend Phil messina and another writer whom i had never met, i might end up with nothing to show for eight years of work... i flew out to los angeles the next week to see what they were talking about. the screening was true to the long line of horrific brainstorm experiences. i hated it. it was, in many ways, everything i feared it would become. many of my ideas were there, but the story barely touched the depths that had once been on the page. Phil Messina joined me in trying to convince doug (the director) to make some last minute changes. he was not interested... professionally, very little good came out of brainstorm. agents and producers never talked to me about it. it was a failed film, politely to be avoided in genteel conversation. everyone in hollywood has these films, often long lists of them. when people at parties or on airplanes ask what you do, you hesitate to even acknowledge them as yours. they are like children who have died. you cannot discuss them in a casual way... it was later resurrected in the burgeoning video market and became what people politely call a 'cult' film."

[Mr. Merrill Lehrl]

Much to dislike about the story, it's true, though I admit I watched Brainstorm due to interest in the ways Trumbull influenced Noé, and ways previous uses of POV in cinema influenced Enter the Void.  The opening scene in Brainstorm is strikingly similar, in portions, to a hospital scene in Void.  The camera seemingly floats.  Amazingly there are also similar astral journeys and visual art transitions; powerful similarities that Noé must have had in mind, as well as Trumbull's work on 2001, while concocting Void.

There's little reason to watch the movie outside these esoteric curiosities.

[matt35mm]

I liked Sound of My Voice quite a bit more, but I found a lot to like about this, as well. Yeah, it's a bit hit and miss, but I was engaged with everything that I was seeing, and was moved by it. I even felt a bit of wonder at the sci-fi elements, which really works more as a poetic device. I wouldn't call the movie a bait-and-switch by any means; the sci-fi part and the drama part form a harmony.

I don't feel like this needed to be more subtle or anything. I don't mind the sledgehammer approach. I'd say my main issue with the movie is that the love story doesn't always feel like it's happening organically. I love the idea of that love story, but the movie gets to it by a mix of coincidences and skipping ahead, and we kind of just have to accept that they fell in love because the movie really wanted them to.

So the love story is probably the weakest part of the film, for me. The guilt of this woman who was on the path to such a different life, and her need to eventually confess to him, kept me engaged, though. The other Earth aspect then provided just the right dose of wondering "what if you had done just one thing different?" to complement the main story. I don't think it gets overly philosophical. It doesn't have to. It just plants the question in your head, which is a question that we ask ourselves all the time, so we can bring our own philosophy into the story.

I probably also liked it because, having liked Sound of My Voice and subsequently learning a bunch of stuff about how these two movies were written and made, I brought a lot of my good feelings about Brit Marling to Another Earth.

I kind of wish that Sound of My Voice was released first, because that film gives a better sense of how talented and smart Brit Marling is. Those who see and are underwhelmed by Another Earth will probably start getting annoyed at all the hype that's beginning to build around Marling. Sound of My Voice is the film that lives up to that hype.

That said, Another Earth is an easier sell and will do more for more audience members, and it'll make more money. And I thought it was a pretty decent movie, and pretty inspiring as a genuine made-for-no-money movie.