Ratings
THE DAILY: 3.5 of 5 stars
ROTTEN TOMATOES: 61%
What if, when the aliens finally came, they weren’t malevolent or infinitely wise or shaped like giant Roswell gift-shop toys but instead were just, well, us?
This is, in part, the premise of “Another Earth,” which opens with an orb that looks a lot like ours, hanging heavy in the night sky. The sudden appearance of this other planet, quickly dubbed “Earth 2,” startles the MIT-bound, 17-year-old Rhoda (Brit Marling), as she drives home from a party. Drunk and distracted, she accelerates into another car, killing the pregnant mother and son inside and leaving the bereft father, composer John Burroughs (William Mapother), widowed and in a coma. Rhoda goes to jail. Burroughs wakes up eventually, though the amount he drinks suggests that he’d rather not have.
This is the stuff of a thousand low-budget Sundance darlings — which is what “Another Earth” was before being picked up for distribution. The obligatory cycle of tragedy, forgiveness and redemption that follows Rhoda’s accident is leaden in its indie inevitability. Audiences may melt at the sight of the movie’s co-writer Marling, who is her own kind of alien — a refugee from a galaxy where the women write their own scripts and are ethereally but approachably beautiful, even in bulky ski hats — walking toward Burroughs’ house four years after the accident with an apology in her ex-con heart. But we all know that Marling and her co-author, director Mike Cahill, will ensure that these two will make it harder on themselves before they make it easier.
Rhoda stumbles at her victim’s door, makes up a lie about being from a cleaning service, and sets about trying to tidy Burroughs’s cluttered house and shattered heart, all while the impending revelation of her treachery performs a sort of ominous duet with the film’s insistently annoying noise-music soundtrack.
Meanwhile, the other planet hurtles ever closer. “Their cities are our cities,” a scientist drones in voiceover, and — as we learn in an electric scene in which a government official finds herself in a nationally televised interstellar radio chat with a woman who bears the same name, same voice, and same childhood as she does — their people are our people. They are not like us. They are us. “You think they call themselves Earth 2?” Burroughs asks Rhoda. The answer, of course, is no. The implied possibility is that we might not like the face in the mirror if it could come alive and talk to us.
Rhoda and Burroughs don’t like themselves much to begin with, though, and so in “Another Earth,” a potentially rich existential dilemma is explored mostly as an opportunity for a good ol’ fresh start. Rhoda enters an essay contest, the prize of which is a trip on a space shuttle to Earth 2. Later, when Burroughs, still ignorant of Rhoda’s past, asks her what she might eventually say to another version of herself, she pauses for a moment then replies: “Better luck next time.”
This is pretty much what waifish and haunted 21-year-olds say in indie movies, but the better question may well be the one Rhoda poses to Burroughs as the two huddle by a telescope at his window and gaze upwards at the contours of another Eastern seaboard, trying to find their second selves. “I wonder if I’m cleaning your house,” she says.
Grief and regret, we can be certain, is something we all share — even our doppelgangers. The real conundrum, which “Another Earth” toys with but ultimately backs down from, is how much control we have over the rest of it.
THE DAILY: 3.5 of 5 stars
ROTTEN TOMATOES: 61%
What if, when the aliens finally came, they weren’t malevolent or infinitely wise or shaped like giant Roswell gift-shop toys but instead were just, well, us?
This is, in part, the premise of “Another Earth,” which opens with an orb that looks a lot like ours, hanging heavy in the night sky. The sudden appearance of this other planet, quickly dubbed “Earth 2,” startles the MIT-bound, 17-year-old Rhoda (Brit Marling), as she drives home from a party. Drunk and distracted, she accelerates into another car, killing the pregnant mother and son inside and leaving the bereft father, composer John Burroughs (William Mapother), widowed and in a coma. Rhoda goes to jail. Burroughs wakes up eventually, though the amount he drinks suggests that he’d rather not have.
This is the stuff of a thousand low-budget Sundance darlings — which is what “Another Earth” was before being picked up for distribution. The obligatory cycle of tragedy, forgiveness and redemption that follows Rhoda’s accident is leaden in its indie inevitability. Audiences may melt at the sight of the movie’s co-writer Marling, who is her own kind of alien — a refugee from a galaxy where the women write their own scripts and are ethereally but approachably beautiful, even in bulky ski hats — walking toward Burroughs’ house four years after the accident with an apology in her ex-con heart. But we all know that Marling and her co-author, director Mike Cahill, will ensure that these two will make it harder on themselves before they make it easier.
Rhoda stumbles at her victim’s door, makes up a lie about being from a cleaning service, and sets about trying to tidy Burroughs’s cluttered house and shattered heart, all while the impending revelation of her treachery performs a sort of ominous duet with the film’s insistently annoying noise-music soundtrack.
Meanwhile, the other planet hurtles ever closer. “Their cities are our cities,” a scientist drones in voiceover, and — as we learn in an electric scene in which a government official finds herself in a nationally televised interstellar radio chat with a woman who bears the same name, same voice, and same childhood as she does — their people are our people. They are not like us. They are us. “You think they call themselves Earth 2?” Burroughs asks Rhoda. The answer, of course, is no. The implied possibility is that we might not like the face in the mirror if it could come alive and talk to us.
Rhoda and Burroughs don’t like themselves much to begin with, though, and so in “Another Earth,” a potentially rich existential dilemma is explored mostly as an opportunity for a good ol’ fresh start. Rhoda enters an essay contest, the prize of which is a trip on a space shuttle to Earth 2. Later, when Burroughs, still ignorant of Rhoda’s past, asks her what she might eventually say to another version of herself, she pauses for a moment then replies: “Better luck next time.”
This is pretty much what waifish and haunted 21-year-olds say in indie movies, but the better question may well be the one Rhoda poses to Burroughs as the two huddle by a telescope at his window and gaze upwards at the contours of another Eastern seaboard, trying to find their second selves. “I wonder if I’m cleaning your house,” she says.
Grief and regret, we can be certain, is something we all share — even our doppelgangers. The real conundrum, which “Another Earth” toys with but ultimately backs down from, is how much control we have over the rest of it.
