Just got done watching "Europa Report". This is a new movie about a mission to Jupiter's moon, Europa. It is told in the same style as "Chronicle" and "Apollo 18". Essentially, the story is conveyed through the on-board video system inside and outside the ship along with some inserted segments from a mission chief on Earth. The story is told in a retrospective and the time-line jumps around a lot at first so you are trying to figure out what is going on for the first 30 minutes or so. If you want to follow the story you actually have to pay attention. This is a plus.
I was really into the movie for the first 70 minutes. It was something rare in film, a true sci-fi. Not a fantasy disguised as sci-fi. But like all good sci-fi, the movie was not about the gadgets or the settings. It was about the people on board ship and their actions under some extreme circumstances.
Still after all was said and done, I was completely unsatisfied by the end of the movie. After the 70 minute mark, the movie took a turn onto what I thought was a predictable path, and I predicted what the end of the movie would sort of look like 15 minutes before it happened.
I still recommend this movie, but just barely.
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Though the movie had me riveted for the first 70 or so minutes, I started rolling my eyes when the “monster movie” began. I was pretty much expecting that development, but I was hoping against hope that there would be some other plot device deployed to rise to the level of the rest of the movie.
It really isn’t a monster movie, or about a cover up on a secret mission, so I hesitate to make this comparison, but at the point where the lander was on Europa where one of the crew saw a light outside the ship, I though…. “Apollo 18”. There were so many parallels from this point forward, it was hard not to think of that god-awful “horror” flick. I thought at that point, “There’s going to be some unknown life form and they are all going to die.”
Of course. I kept thinking to myself, “No, I see the retrospective documentary style interview a la Hell's Kitchen, or Survivor, and communications with Earth are down, so they must make it back in order to tell their stories for this retrospective.” But when during the last “interview segment” the last survivor grabbed the camera revealing where she really was, I knew (paraphrasing Ard from "Heavy Metal") she died, he died, everyone died.
The reveal of the creature at the end was also unsatisfying only because the device is, to me, old and tired. I was utterly disappointed. A giant bio-luminescent squid? Really? To me, it may as well have been a giant Cyclops (guy in a rubber suit) bashing a rock on top of the Chariot (Lost in Space) at that point.
Yes, I know the movie was about the discovery and the selfless actions of the crew to transmit the discovery back to Earth. I knew it was about the leap in human knowledge. I was just so disappointed at the clichéd device used to convey the story.
Still, I did really like the first 70 minutes or so.
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