Proxima. (18.)
Directed by Alice Winocour.
Starring Eva Green, Zélie Boulant, Matt Dillon, Aleksey Fateev, Lars Eidinger, Sandra Hüller. In French, English, German and Russian with subtitles. In cinemas. 107 mins.
Eva Green has been selected to go into space, representing France. She will be a member of an international team that will spend a year in a space station, making preparations for an expedition to Mars. Wow, she must be so excited; she's dreamed of being an astronaut since she was eight. But, she spends most of the film resentful that the period of intense training and preparation she has to go through means she can't spend any quality time with her daughter (Bolant.)
A film about the training for a space mission is inherently flawed. Imagine a portrait of an Olympic swimming champion where we follow them getting up early in the morning to train in the pool; and then getting up early the next morning to do more training in the pool; and the next day and the next, right upto the moment they get to the Olympics and the gun fires to start the race, and the film ends.
You can tell a lot about the state of humanity at any particular time by the films about space exploration we are making. In the sixties, 2001 saw us boldly but humbly strike out into the unknown galaxy. It was emotionally cold but filled with wonder. In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey bleats on about how going off to into space to save humanity meant missing seeing his daughter grow up. How unfair that Saving The Whole Human Race entailed an element of personal sacrifice.
Proxima is meant to be a feminist statement but it struck me as another expression of Breeder Entitlement, the notion often expressed in film and TV dramas that spawning can never be superseded as the most precious human action. Of course, reproduction is important but with the global population pushing 8 billion, it's not as if we haven't got a few spares lying around. Becoming an astronaut is hard on family life, but, against that, you get to go into space. Which is what You always wanted.
At the end of Proxima, faced with spending a year separated from her daughter, Big Spoiler, Green risks the success of the mission and the lives of her fellow crew members by breaking out of a pre-launch quarantine, to keep a promise to her daughter.
Films like this make the case for the human race staying home. We are so self-absorbed and riddled with sentimentality we are just going to show ourselves up in front of the whole universe.
Directed by Alice Winocour.
Starring Eva Green, Zélie Boulant, Matt Dillon, Aleksey Fateev, Lars Eidinger, Sandra Hüller. In French, English, German and Russian with subtitles. In cinemas. 107 mins.
Eva Green has been selected to go into space, representing France. She will be a member of an international team that will spend a year in a space station, making preparations for an expedition to Mars. Wow, she must be so excited; she's dreamed of being an astronaut since she was eight. But, she spends most of the film resentful that the period of intense training and preparation she has to go through means she can't spend any quality time with her daughter (Bolant.)
A film about the training for a space mission is inherently flawed. Imagine a portrait of an Olympic swimming champion where we follow them getting up early in the morning to train in the pool; and then getting up early the next morning to do more training in the pool; and the next day and the next, right upto the moment they get to the Olympics and the gun fires to start the race, and the film ends.
You can tell a lot about the state of humanity at any particular time by the films about space exploration we are making. In the sixties, 2001 saw us boldly but humbly strike out into the unknown galaxy. It was emotionally cold but filled with wonder. In Interstellar, Matthew McConaughey bleats on about how going off to into space to save humanity meant missing seeing his daughter grow up. How unfair that Saving The Whole Human Race entailed an element of personal sacrifice.
Proxima is meant to be a feminist statement but it struck me as another expression of Breeder Entitlement, the notion often expressed in film and TV dramas that spawning can never be superseded as the most precious human action. Of course, reproduction is important but with the global population pushing 8 billion, it's not as if we haven't got a few spares lying around. Becoming an astronaut is hard on family life, but, against that, you get to go into space. Which is what You always wanted.
At the end of Proxima, faced with spending a year separated from her daughter, Big Spoiler, Green risks the success of the mission and the lives of her fellow crew members by breaking out of a pre-launch quarantine, to keep a promise to her daughter.
Films like this make the case for the human race staying home. We are so self-absorbed and riddled with sentimentality we are just going to show ourselves up in front of the whole universe.
