Europa Report
Sneak Peek at "Europa Report"
The festival of space epics continues. Whether it's a reaction to the expectation of discoveries from the Mars Curiosity Rover, the increase in quality of computer graphics, or simply because the only way to get people to go to cinemas instead of sitting at home is to offer a vast visual landscape (and it doesn't get any bigger than space) - we've been inundated with movies about space this year.
From Oblvion to After Earth, Gravity to Star Trek Into Darkness... the use of space as a cinematic canvas has hit it's peak in the last few years - almost to exhaustian point. So what is the next logical step? Small space stories. And that's exactly what you're getting with Europa Report.
From what we understand, Europa Report follows a modern day mission (finally, none of this "in the not to distant future bulls wallop) to Jupiter's moon Europa in order to investigate the possible existence of alien life within our solar system. Seems pretty straight forward, right?
Well, of course, something is going to go wrong! In fact, when unmanned probes gives hints that underneath Europa hidden ocean, life may exist in the form of a single-celled organism.
So, much like Prometheus, a privately funded space exploration company (called "Europa Ventures") sends six astronauts to confirm the data and explore the revolutionary discoveries.
Obviously, there is a near catastrophic tech problem which leads to loss of communication with Earth (yay, space isolation!) and the death of a crew member. This leads to the surviving astronauts to over come the psychological and physical toll of deep space travel and survive a discovery on Europa more profound than they had ever imagined.
This is the perfect kind of cheap space movie. It tackles the BIGGEST issue of all - is there life elsewhere - by tackling the BIGGER issue of humanity. All of this is contained in a claustophic environment.
Some of these movies turn out great, a lot turn out terrible (especially when they start to address the idea of Gods and "Energy Beings") so it will be interesting to see which direction it goes.
