Continuing Alabama Liberal’s alien invasion day, is a movie that isn’t really about alien invasions. Another Earth is essentially two movies. One of them is a ponderous, unrealistic drama about a young woman (Brit Marling) who kills a man’s (William Mapother) family in a drunken car wreck and then strikes up a relationship with the the unaware man four years later. The other is about the discovery of Another Earth that appears in our sky the same night she crashes into the man’s family.
Only one of these movies really interested me and since this week isn’t called “Heavy Handed Relationship Dramas with Hardly Any Dialogue Week” I’ll let you guess which one.
What Worked: William Mapother, otherwise known as Tom Cruise’s cousin or one of the bad guys from Lost, proves once again he’s better than a lot of the roles he’s given. And although the concept of another, identical Earth with a copy of us on it is fascinating, the movie uses it primarily as a metaphor. Even then it’s still worth thinking about the central question “Did alternate you make the same choices in life? Do you think exactly the same? What would you say to yourself?” Except that the characters in this movie barely have anything to say, which brings us to the movie’s flaws…
What Doesn’t: Brit Marling (who also wrote the film which explains why she’s in it) is an actress of almost no range. Her performance is stilted, confused, awkward, and almost makes you wonder if the lead character is brain damaged. The entire movie is very big on long, dry pauses with no dialogue and when the characters do speak, it’s clear they don’t have a lot to say. Mapother’s grieving family man does what he can with the role of a man drowning in his own misery but Marling never lets us in on exactly why her character does anything. A better actress could have shown the gears working without saying a word. Also, the fact that the movie seems so uninterested in its primary hook–Another Earth–makes you wonder why they bothered to include it at all. No lead character really has much to say on the subject.
What I Would Have Done Differently: Well, it would have been nice if Marling’s lead character would have briefly roused out of her stupor long enough to say “Hey, wait, there’s a giant fucking Earth in the sky!” As is, she barely seems to care about it, which makes the audience wonder why they should. I would have made the secondary Earth more integral to the plot or dropped the big blue metaphor in the sky entirely. But if they’d dropped it entirely I probably wouldn’t have watched this movie.