Sci-Fi, Hold the Schmaltz
By: Bruce Mccandless Iii
Tags: Hollywood, Sci-Fi, Movies, Jupiter, Science Fiction

SIX WAYS EUROPA REPORT IS SMARTER THAN HOLLYWOOD — AND WHY THAT MEANS NO ONE WILL REMEMBER IT

WARNING: SUPER-DUPER SPOILERS

Europa Report is a sci-fi flick released in 2013, to critical high fives and lukewarm audience approval. Chronicling a hypothetical future scientific mission to Jupiter’s moon Europa, it’s a smart genre effort, the kind that spends at least a little time trying to make the science as convincing as the fiction. For example, the spaceship has a rotating, centrifuge-like component that provides artificial gravity, essential for a crew that wants to maintain strong bones and muscles, and the crew is shielded from cosmic radiation by water contained in the hull of the spaceship. With clever special effects and the creative use of “found footage,” purportedly from a number of video feeds on board the spacecraft, it’s a self-aware film that goes out of its way to avoid Hollywood conventions. Here’s how:

1. A true ensemble cast. The six astronauts — one American, one Chinese, two Russians, and two Europeans — get approximately equal screen time, with no “main” character, no Ellen Ripley, emerging as the focus of the film.

2. No skin. Unlike a typical Hollywood film, the characters don’t gaze at each other longingly, trade wisecracks, and then fall (float?) into bed as a pop song swells in the background. These astronauts are all — or mostly — business. There’s no recreational sex to keep us interested along the way. The crew are all more or less normal, fairly fit (they’re astronauts, after all) people. There’s not a George Clooney or a Brad Pitt among them, much less a John or Sarah Connor.

3. No Theatrics as Therapy. Thankfully, no character is able to use the rigors of the expedition as a way to work through long-standing psychological hang-ups: phobias, childhood traumas, daddy issues. (This Hollywood trope is seen in glorious and smarmy full effect in the recent Chris Pratt schmaltz-fest The Tomorrow War, in which Pratt and his emotionally withholding Vietnam vet father unite to bring down a series of hitherto apparently indestructible alien invaders.)

4. There’s no climactic CGI-enhanced humans vs. aliens battle, in which our plucky hominids don their plot armor, dodge projectiles, and somehow figure out their menacing opponents’ one weakness — Smaug’s missing scale or the Death Star’s ancillary exhaust port, for example — and exploit it to devastating effect.

5. No Post-It note personality quirks distinguish the characters. There’s no Lt. Gorman, Mr. Spock, or War Daddy here, and no one loses it, hallucinates, or simply breaks down (“Game over, man. Game over!”) under the pressure. The crew in Europa Report consult, discuss, and make mostly smart, calculated decisions, though it doesn’t matter in the end. It’s karma by committee, fate by faculty meeting.

6. There’s no closing credits hint of future menace. The typical Hollywood sci-fi or horror flick ends not with a grace note but with a minor chord, by way of signifying dread about an as-yet-unseen threat that lies ahead. Maybe the alien menace hasn’t been defeated after all. Maybe the seeds of our destruction are being carried back to Earth with our plucky crew. Europa Report doesn’t want to talk about that. The film’s alien encounter is a startling, even horrifying one, but it’s not one that promises doom to the people of Earth. Not yet, anyway.

Europa Report isn’t completely immune to Hollywood convention. The mission loses its ability to communicate with Earth. Fair enough. The feeling of being cut off and alone is essential to any good thriller. And the crew does engage in that hoariest of thriller cliches, the split-up, though here various individuals separate from the group for plausible, well-argued reasons. Finally, there’s a BIG REVEAL at the climax of the film that takes us right back to the fairy tale origins of both sci-fi and horror. But because we haven’t been able, or forced, to concentrate on the romantic or other psychological deviations of any particular members of the crew, and no one’s distinguished him- or herself by either courage or cowardice, stoicism or stupidity, it’s hard to get excited about the fate of our protagonists. The movie falls flat just when it should be exploding.

Maybe what I’m saying is that there’s a reason for schmaltz, for spectacle, for folly and the various other extremes of human behavior. While I admire Europa Report for the strength of its convictions, there’s nothing in this clinical, cerebral film that resonates like Michael Biehn throwing back his raincoat to reveal a pump-action shotgun as the Terminator closes in on Linda Hamilton, or like Ripley stomping out in her metal exoskeleton to defend the child she loves from the Queen Bitch Alien. There’s nothing, in other words, that slaps out us of our rational easy chairs and into the grip of our adrenal glands.

A semi-naked android spouting poetry as he considers whether to kill Harrison Ford on the rainy roof of a crumbling midtown apartment building?

It’s ridiculous, sure. But it’s more than that, too. It’s memorable.

Europa Report never takes it glasses off. It’s all cerebral silvers and frigid blues, lunar ice and low-key intentions. As a consequence, we never get to know the movie’s luckless explorers well enough to create that bond of derision and familiarity with them that makes us want to roll our eyes, argue with the screen, scream at the creature in the shadows. In other words, it’s a fine, intelligent movie, and one that I’ll soon forget.