The Titan (2018)

Film review #692

Director: Lennart Ruff

SYNOPSIS: With the earth suffering ecological collapse, a secret project at a military base aims to transform selected soldiers to adapt them to life on Titan, with the eventual goal of resettling humanity there. One such recruit, Rick Janssen moves onto the military base with his family, and when he begins to change due to the experiments, his Wife becomes increasingly concerned that they are changing him a bit too much…

THOUGHTS/ANALYSIS: The Titan is 2018 sci-fi film. Set in a near future where Earth is suffering ecological collapse thanks to overpopulation and pollution…all the usual stuff. With this mind, a special project has been devised to adapt a select group of people to life on Saturn’s moon Titan, with the eventual goal of moving people to live there. Rick Janssen is one of the recruits who moves onto the military base with his family where the experiments are being conducted. The film operates on two different levels: One, it follows the story of the recruits as they undergo their training and experiments, and two, following Rick and his family, and how these experiments impact him on a personal level alongside his family. The problem is that neither of these two arcs are significantly developed to give enough of a backbone for the film. With regards to the former, the backdrop of the film of the world’s seeming collapse isn’t really shown outside of quickfire news reports and slideshows, and despite this, there doesn’t really seem to be any sense of urgency, at least in what we are shown. I could understand this if the focus was more on a personal family drama, but as mentioned, that doesn’t work either. With the film setting up the goal of eventually reaching Titan, the film actually doesn’t achieve that, other than a small scene at the end showing Rick there. Given that everyone else died during the experiments it doesn’t seem that great that only one person made it by completely changing their physiology. Again, given that the Earth is ecologically failing, this doesn’t really seem to bode well for the future of humanity, which is what this whole project was based on. I get that it’s only a first step, but for the film to give us nothing more on this front leaves a lot to be desired.

Secondly, with regards to the family drama and how the experiments affect his personal life, there’s just not enough emotional depth, and it’s constantly distracted by all the other stuff going on. We get to see some of the other recruits and their families and how they are reacting to the whole situation, but the supporting characters aren’t really given enough screen time to define them as significant characters. One of the other big problems is that Rick’s Wife becomes suspicious about the injections and experiments and that they’re producing strange side effects and changing him, which she seems surprised about. The trouble with this is…she should have expected it to some degree? The whole project is literally adapting a human to survive on the surface of a moon on the other end of the solar system; of course they’re body is going to have to change dramatically. She is also established as a biologist or scientist of some form, so she obviously must have some idea about these things, but the fact that she seems so shocked about what the experiments entail just seems very confusing. maybe she didn’t expect them to be so severe, but that just isn’t made clear. I’ve had a lot of negative things to say about this thus far, but honestly it’s not terrible; it just lacks a lot of focus and depth. The trailer is cut to make it seem like more of an action film, which is also very misleading. The other aspects of the production are fine, not much else to say about them. The Titan is short on the details and the drama: starting off well but falling apart later on when it has no idea what it wants to do with the premise.