Another Earth (2011)

I saw Another Earth about a week or so before writing this (I am really behind on my reviews, and haven’t seen a lot of movies in this time, as I have been recently obsessed with How I Met Your Mother), and I didn’t want to write a review immediately, as I wasn’t sure of my feelings towards this film. But after listening to the first official episode of Remote Viewing on the brilliant site Spill.com, I have decided to flesh out my review. Let me get this straight-this is not a science fiction film. This isn’t even a sci-fi drama. The absolutely perfectly wonderful films Solaris or Moon are sci-fi dramas (more Solaris then Moon, but still), this is a drama with a science fiction plot point to push the story along. Personally, I’ve wanted to see this film as soon as it was in theaters, but to say the least, it is quite difficult to convince a group of eighth-graders to see a slow science-fiction drama that costs eleven bucks each. Now personally, watching it on iTunes, this is a wonderful film, but an absolutely polarizing film at that. Much like the wonderful drama The Tree of Life or the very good sci-fi action film Inception, people who have seen this film will fight over it. I have been in fights with people over The Tree of Life, and I will be in fights with people over Another Earth. Directed by first-time narrative director Mike Cahill and written by Cahill and Brit Marling, the indie film stars Marling as Rhoda Williams, a recently-accepted MIT student who, after a night of partying and underage drinking, while staring at this other planet that suddenly appeared in the sky, gets in a car wreck, killing a wife, her son, and putting the father into a coma. Arrested for involuntary manslaughter, Williams is released five years later, around the time that the husband wakes up. The planet that was discovered is said to be another planet earth, exactly like our own, until the moment where we became visible to each other, the night Williams got in the car wreck. Williams, due to the fact that she is a brilliant person who was accepted into MIT with a full ride (I believe that is the case), enters an essay contest (which is about as ridiculous as another planet appearing in the sky, but we can let that go) to fly on a spaceship to Earth 2. While this is happening, she tried to go to the husband’s (John Burroughs, played by William Mapother) house to apologize and beg for forgiveness, but she loses her nerve and pretends to be a maid, who is working for this man while she tries to apologize for, basically, wrecking his life, all while the business with Earth 2 is happening. Personally, I believe that I am talking too much about the science-fiction aspects of this film, as this is a full thorough drama film, a wonderful one at that, but very little a sci-fi film. The science fiction is a microscopic detail that is coated in the drama, the electric score, the absolutely fabulous script, and the brilliant performances by Marling and Mapother. The film was shot for two-hundred-thousand dollars, and it shows with some uncomfortable hand-held shots and just uneven moments, but that is expected with a film like this. I truly hope and pray that more money is given to Cahill for his next film, one that I will definitely see, as he has made one of those movies that show people like me that movies can be made on the cheap. This is a wonderful film, this is Cahill’s Attack the Block, his District 9, heck, it’s his Reservoir Dogs. And that is high praise enough.
9/10