If you like sci-fi movies and are uncertain whether or not you’ll enjoy found footage movies, Europa Report is a solid movie to test your tastes. It is about a multinational six-person, privately funded mission to determine whether or not there is life on Jupiter’s moon, Europa. The story unfolds like a documentary cutting between interviews from mission control interspersed with confessionals and footage from the explorers. Even though the story is not linear, it is not confusing because there are time elapsed stamps on the footage.
Unlike most space exploration movies, Europa Report is refreshingly professional. Usually movies leap to psychological madness as the immediate response to any setback, and when it involves a mixed gender team, it becomes a thinly veiled excused to depict sexual violence, which never happens in this movie. Even when the crew is strained, they are still a team who want to succeed at their mission: to go further than any human being has ever gone into deep space and transmit their discoveries back to Earth. Perhaps the prior is more realistic, but after a glut of dystopian, pessimistic movies set in space, it is refreshing to see a movie in which background checks were probably conducted, and after decades of experience, the crew doesn’t fall apart.
Even though Europa Report is fiction, it models its setbacks after real life problems faced by actual astronauts, which I didn’t know while I was watching the movie, but explains why the pacing of the story works and why the gradual build up of tension and doom slowly outweighs the optimism and excitement of the crew at the outset of the mission. While some of the plot twists are predictable (Don’t go into the light, Carol Anne), others are quite ordinary with credibly disproportionate consequences because they are in space, an atmosphere innately hostile to alien life. Like a good Stephen King novel, there are clear signals that something will go wrong, but the way that the events play out is understated and unpredictable given the way that the story is told and how counterintuitive the crew’s responses are to the growing challenges. They aren’t dumb. They’re noble.
If you’re coming for scary, sinister aliens, don’t bother watching Europa Report. It isn’t that kind of movie. While it has horror movie elements, there is no trap laid out for the crew. Life on Europa is not exactly a MacGuffin, but it isn’t the point for the viewers. This movie should not be confused with a similar, but far inferior found footage movie, Apollo 18, in which a mission to our moon goes incredibly wrong because the aliens are trying to kill them. This movie is about the human spirit in the face of enormous challenges whereas Apollo 18 was more about discovering how the aliens were going to destroy the astronauts.
In a nice countercultural twist, Europa Report depicts the women as less risk averse than the men, and it is the men whose eyewitness testimony is doubted by others or rationalized as symptomatic of an illness. It isn’t done in a condescending or a dismissive way, and the women aren’t swaggering Captain Kirks because everyone is still professional, but it is done in a subtle enough manner to be noticeable yet not overbearing in its reversal. The gender role reversal is not about questioning our assumptions, but showing that regardless of genders, all people have traits that are usually considered customary for one group and not the other. Men can be cautious, and women can be brave. Everyone can be selfless.
Europa Report feels like an old-fashioned movie in the best way possible, a pre-2016 world in which there were standards and lofty goals. When things go wrong, it isn’t out of negligence or ego, but because life is unpredictable. Even though the ending is haunting, it is impressive because of the way that it shows humanity embracing collective ideals of science and knowledge over instinctual, individual and elemental impulses.
Europa Report has a great cast even if most of the actors aren’t household names. Even though the movie is around ninety minutes, which feels like the perfect length for this movie, the acting is such high quality that as a viewer, I immediately knew each crewmember’s personality. The dearly departed Michael Nyqvist stands out as the most experienced astronaut in the crew. Schindler’s List’s Embeth Davidtz has a small, but crucial role as the CEO of the company that funded the mission. The Wire’s Isiah Whitlock Jr. also plays a small role, and he does not utter his signature expletive. My apologies to Karolina Wydra, whom I was convinced was Alias’ Mia Maestro, but they aren’t even from the same country. Bear McCreary scored the film, and he is best known for his impressive work on Battlestar Galatica.
Unlike many found footage movies, you probably won’t suffer from motion sickness while watching Europa Report. This movie does not use the genre as an excuse to do sloppy work. It is elegantly executed and judicious in its use of obstructed vision to create suspense. It does not feel low budget.
I highly recommend Europa Report as one of the stronger sci-fi films centered in space, but I am disappointed that the director, Sebastian Cordero, an Ecuadorian filmmaker trained in America, did not appear to get rewarded for doing excellent work. I hope that we see more from him in the near future.