#736 – Aniara (2018)

Aniara (2018)

Director: Pella Kagerman, Hugo Lilja

Film review #736

SYNOPSIS: A luxury space cruiser, Aniara, is knocked off course on it’s flight to Mars, and drifts off into space. Faced with isolation, the crew and passengers begin to lose their grip on reality. M.R. is one of the staff members who supervises the Mima, an artificial intelligence who simulates Earth’s nature to prevent passengers getting homesick, but when Mima is destroyed, society begins to unravel aboard the ship…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: Aniara is a 2018 Swedish/Danish sci-fi film based on the 1956 Swedish epic poem of the same name. I am not familiar with the poem and it’s cultural legacy, so my thoughts will not be based upon it. The plot concerns a luxury space liner, the Aniara, which is knocked off course when it hits space debris and is forced to dump its fuel. With no way to get back on course until they can reach a celestial body to turn around, the crew and passengers are stuck aboard and try to stay sane. The film is a classic sci-fi setup of what happens in space in isolation with no contact, and how it affects the people involved: it has a sense of the landmark films such as Solaris and 2001, but is intended to be much more visceral and down-to Earth (so to speak), filling the runtime with nudity, mental breakdowns and death. As such, this is a very downbeat film, carving it’s way through time and peeling away the layers of society and people’s behaviours when that society falls away, eventually leaving us with the question of what is left of ourselves when all these things are taken away. It’s not meant to feel-good; it’s bleak and increasingly hopeless, and the film at least is fearless in grasping this.

While it’s easy to see the broad strokes of what the film is trying to do, the writing and specific elements of the story lose their way fairly often. The story centres around M.R., who manages the Mima, an artificial intelligence that shows people Earth’s natural beauty to escape the cold darkness of space. While this seems to be a major plot point in the beginning, it breaks down fairly early on, and only vaguely becomes part of the plot thereafter, which feels like a bit of a misdirection. The personal relationship of M.R. and another crewmember also factors into things, but again it’s difficult to thread a flowing narrative from all these events. The structure of the film is done by separating events into certain timeskips: weeks after the accident, and moving onto various years after. While I think this could certainly work if the story is right, here it doesn’t quite do so: by jumping from tragedy to tragedy or significant events, there’s little room to establish life on board the ship and what psychologically is happening to the people on board, and also not allowing those existential moments to really come to the fore. Aniara is certainly ambitious and well-made, but the story seems confused as to where it’s going, and is missing a certain clarity that is required to tap into the deeper themes that the film wants to create. A film weighed down by it’s downbeat, fatalistic circumstances that can’t quite get the message through that darkness.