Whilst browsing the DVD section at my local Tesco this weekend just gone, only barely managing to see what I was actually looking at thanks to my glasses steaming up because, like every good citizen not exempt for medical reasons, I had a facemask on, I spotted a title that just immediately jumped out to me as being so completely ridiculous it had to be worth a watch. Assassinaut Space Assassin: "When a team of four rookie astronauts are picked to meet the US President on a space station they believe it's a dream come true, but their dream quickly becomes a nightmare when the station is attacked and they end up crash landing on an alien world with the stations Commander losing his mind and stalking them", it sounded like the perfect mix of kitschy 50's Sci-Fi and modern Indie cinema sprinkled with just enough ridiculousness to make it entertaining. And in what is a first for the blog, I actually ended up paying for it separate to any subscription I already pay for to watch it. That's how much faith I have in this movie turning out to be a perfect fit for this blog!
A decade after a nuclear holocaust and war with an invading alien race, 4 rookie child astronauts are picked to travel to the Presidential Space Station, orbiting an alien world earmarked to be the next Earth, to meet the now President of Earth. The trip goes immediately sour almost straight away when the children arriving on the station witness an assassination attempt on the President at the hands of an alien sympathising Scientist equipped with suicide bomb vest. The resulting explosion obliterates the Station but not before the wounded President, the 4 children and other personnel could be evacuated to the neighbouring planet. Emerging from the Pod, the 4 children respond to a distress beacon left by the President who asks them to come find her, and Sarah (Shannon Hutchinson) takes lead of the party to start the search. Barely into the journey they encounter the Commander of the Station (Vito Trigo) and it is apparent he has some... issues going on... and is bitter and cynical, but he concedes and agrees to go and help the children save the President.
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Wow. This was good. This was really very good. Not at all what the movie title, or the synopsis might lead you to expect. At the beginning of this post I said it sounded kitschy and ridiculous and it was absolutely none of those things. It was very much an Indie production, it had the hallmarks all over it but it was a slick, intelligent psychological thriller that had very little to do with stopping an Assassin Astronaut from killing the President and more to do with the emotional response of abandonment, isolation, and resentment. This might be the most mis-marketed, mis-labelled, mis-presented movie in history?
As prior mentioned, it has a very heavy Indie production aesthetic; tight knit camera shots, a small but modest cast, really dialled back post production, but I don't think it harms the movie in any way. If anything it's the perfect chemistry to produce the picture. There are instances where the reduced budget production is evident with lens flares, inter-camera reflections and other slight imperfections that shine through, but I don't feel like it really destroys the illusion, rather it enhances it, almost putting you in the scene as an independent but unacknowledged observer. There was a fair sprinkling of unsteady filming sequences and shots off angle but again I don't think it damaged the immersion and every time it contributed to the emotion of the moment being portrayed.
The cinematography was outstanding. There were a handful of scenes that I felt could have been composed... well, better without sounding pretentious but for every one of those the movie made it up with x2 more that were composed perfectly that really contributed first; to the underlying theme of uneasiness and insecurity about the mission and then secondly to the sheer isolation and abandonment of the situation. Really excellent work to help portray the narrative of the film. The soundtrack too was really great. The perfect combination of unsettling, eerie sweeping electronic music that was either utilized to illustrate the underlying impending dread of the following scene, or soundtrack the isolated but explorative nature of the children when they were on the planet. If you've ever played Oxenfree, it reminded me of the Scntfc soundtrack from that, it was so good.
The acting was also really great, there isn't pages and pages of dialogue, and the script was thin on the ground in that area, but it felt to me that everybody involved was putting their A-Game into this. Shannon Hutchinson was the lead role playing Sarah, and she is going to have a huge career ahead of her if she continues along the right path. She was called upon here to play a slightly naïve but grounded and confident young girl who goes through every emotion in the spectrum before surviving to the end and she portrayed the character perfectly. Really hope she goes on to play some really big roles in some really big films.
