Review of Another Earth (2011) by Harpreet S — 07 Sep 2012

"Another Earth" is one of the strangest films I've ever seen. It stars the beautiful Brit Marling who gets in a car accident that ultimately kills a composer's wife and children; this accident happens because she is a drunken teenager who discovers that there is an identical earth on the radio and that too from a local music station, if I am not mistaken! I've read that it was made on a low budget, which is very obvious.

I was a bit taken back when I started watching it because the film looks more like a documentary, the characters feel so up close, like you are actually there; it has quite a raw feel. So, Rhoda (Marling) starts pretending to be a cleaning lady at the surviving composer's home in some sort of repentance.

Maybe my most favorite sequence in the film is when they are playing video games; I found it quite charming funny. Although I am saying quite a bit about it, let me assure you that Mike Cahill's debut film is not great; I just find the concept very interesting.

The screenplay is poorly written, besides the two main characters, everyone else are not even remotely real nor do they get much screen time. If you think about it, this film is about the human race discovering a new planet that can be seen with the naked eye, but everyone seems to treat it so casually, like nothing happened.

The parents and the brother of Rhoda are just pathetic; you won't find such poorly descriptive characters. Also, few other faces come about that say their few lines and go away. There is even an online contest to go to the other planet that Rhoda inevitably wins! The whole film is so awkward, yet it somehow holds up because of the relationship between the composer (William Mapother) and Rhoda.

In the most vital sequences, however, Mapother fails to perform convincingly, there is a sequence where he finds out that Rhoda was involved in the accident and he tries to choke her; that sequence was just laughable, I could not believe it.

If you look at Tarkovsky's "Solaris," or more recently Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," which is also about another planet, you will see the vast difference between the work of a grandmaster and a debutant average director.

"Another Earth" is incredibly unpolished, has good intentions, and is so unbelievably false; it is absurd.