DRAMA; 1hr 30min
STARRING: Gunner Wright
Lost in space: Wright
How unimaginable is the life of a lone astronaut, encased in a machine of mind-spinning complexity, whirling through airless, endless space while unable to communicate with another living soul? That’s where Captain Lee Miller (Wright, giving little away) finds himself when his International Space Station loses contact with Earth in writer-director-cinematographer William Eubank’s innovative sci-fi head-scratcher. Miller is a self-contained pragmatist but even he is rattled. “What the hell is going on?” he demands of the unresponsive static.
Excellent question! And while we’re about it, what is the significance of the American Civil War soldiers in the opening scenes? Are the seemingly irrelevant people who pop up with reflective soliloquies figments of Lee’s increasingly fraught dreamscape?
Eubank and his probing, fly-on-the-spaceship-wall camera are in no rush to resolve any burning questions, including that of the fundamental nature of existence, which appears to be the bedrock of Lee’s experience. “I have come to terms,” the weary spaceman resignedly notes after years of punishing solitude, “with the fact that some things will forever remain a mystery.” Amen to that, captain. If weirdness were its own reward, your trippy orbit would be a goldmine.
