Europa Report, set against the blackness of space, is an understated, well-executed example of the monolithic, all-consuming chill.
We are told that what we are watching is declassified footage from the first manned space mission to Europa, one of the moons of Jupiter. Data taken from the moon suggested the presence of water underneath its icy crust, and patches of high temperature. And where there’s water, there might be (or once have been) life. Oh, sure, they could send out another probe, or they could send experts capable of doing things a probe can’t in order to make the most of what is basically a one-shot mission due to its cost. So a crew of six astronauts boards the privately-financed Europa One to make the long, cold trek into the dark. It’s not clear what happened to the mission, but the footage has only been recently declassified, and the talking-head interviews with the mission director and one of the astronauts suggests that something went very wrong.
In fact, the first footage we see is mostly crew members asking what they’re going to do about something that just happened. Someone is missing, and they’re talking about what they should tell his family. It’s elliptical, but it’s very apparent that someone is missing. And they aren't even to Europa yet.
It’s not an especially shocking beginning, but this isn't a movie that trades in quick scares, really. It’s measured, and unfolds in fragments that aren't entirely linear, as befits the nature of deep space communication. We’re seeing footage that took a long time to get back to Earth, and as it develops, the mission had problems with its communications array, so we get bursts from different perspectives, jumping back and forth in time as one disaster after another besets the mission. The atmosphere (ha-ha) is nicely understated- these characters are all pros, used to keeping their head in an emergency and working in dangerous conditions. An air of quiet competence surrounds them, even when things are going badly, and we know almost from the beginning that the mission hasn't gone off without a hitch, even if it takes some time to really get a sense of what’s happened. Personalities aren't especially fleshed out, but they don’t feel like stereotypes either. These are people who have gotten used to working with each other, for good or ill, and the dynamic emerges, like everything else, bit by bit and piece by piece.
In some ways, the mood reminds me of the front half of Alien, though the crew is far less contentious with each other, and the films is less an escalation into terror as it is a slow undertow of dread, as one thing goes wrong after another. It's a sinking feeling in the pit of your stomach that moves at a glacial pace, but never stops. It's not so much that nobody can hear you scream in space, as is it that it will take them months and years to hear it from where you are. It's a feeling of doom, abetted by the realistic scale of the whole mission and the relentlessness of an utterly hostile environment.
The fragmentary nature of the narrative allows the filmmakers to play with our expectations a bit as well - it's worth keeping unspoiled, but there's a reveal in the third act that undermines a lot of our expectations for where everything is going, in a way that basically says "all bets are off" without really being a twist, per se. Basically the film, like the implacable dark of space itself, says that it doesn't matter what we want or what we expect - this is what's happening, this is why it happened that way, and this is the price we've paid for what we know now, as the narrative assembles itself and the last pieces fall into place, and the true cost makes itself known.
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