ANIARA

A cold dreariness as pervasive as a Swedish midwinter hangs over ANIARA.  The tone serves the plot well, as it underscores the plight of the passengers, though the side-effect is that it drains the film of any kind of spark.  That wouldn’t necessarily be a problem if it weren’t for the fact that there are no great characters to latch on to. The film is so burdened by a structure that characters only seem to exist to do functional duties in furtherance of the plot.  To top it off, the cast simply has no charisma.

Another major problem is the premise of the film.  Why would you build a massive self-sustaining luxury liner the size of a city when the purpose is a three week trip to Mars?  You have to leave Earth orbit, accelerate to incredible speeds, then decelerate into Mars orbit. Since force is equal to mass times acceleration, the greater mass you have the greater force it takes.  Having a massive ship for this journey would never be possible, not to mention logical, no matter your level of technology. I know the metaphor is one of a cruise ship, but in the boat, case weight doesn’t matter, because you’re floating.  In a spaceship, mass is everything.

“…a great concept, a coherent tone, an uncompromising vision, and the ballsiest ending…”

Second, once a ship that massive is on a straight course, you can’t just turn it 90 degrees —you’d need a good fraction of the amount of fuel that it took to launch it.  To avoid space debris you’d just give your ship a little thrust to get around it. And every space vessel has multiple backups and contingency plans, though here the most predictable of failure modes dooms everyone in an instant. And they don’t seem capable of communicating with Earth or Mars for some reason that is left unexplained.  I get it – the writers needed a way to just isolate everyone, but then when the solutions they came up with are laughable, it undercuts the seriousness of the whole project. Would you go see a movie about a financial disaster if it were written with a kindergartener’s sense of economics? Why should it be any different with space movies?

Finally, a big plot development (that I won’t spoil), happens partway through the film, but it seems to happen totally by chance. Astrophysically speaking, the chances of this happening are zero. This implies that it didn’t happen by chance, but the smartest character (an astrophysicist who is marginalized at every turn) says that it was indeed dumb luck.  Such is the fate of ANIARA, where brilliant ideas are subverted within seconds by abject stupidity.