Europa Report: Movie Review

I am always a fan of science fiction films and happy for any science fiction that comes my way. In this case Europa Report is a fairly independent movie that is being released online and On Demand before being shown in theaters. I recently watched this through my cable providers "Video On Demand" feature, where you can purchase a rental of this movie for $9.99 (ouch). There are both standard definition and high-definition versions available, but if you get one you don't get the other, so use with caution. I think releasing movies straight to the internet/on demand and skipping the theaters is a new strategy in the movie industry. Hear about that trend in this recent NPR: On Point broad cast: Is the U.S. Movie Industry Broken?

Europa Credit: NASA

Europa Report is about a fictional manned-mission to Jupiter with a landing on the icy moon Europa. One of the four large "Galilean moons" of Jupiter, it has an icy crust, and as we all know, likely to have a sub-surface ocean of liquid water. This near-future sci-fi to stick closely to known technologies and science, might be what one would call "hard sci-fi", more 2001 than Star Wars. But actual science is not usually box-office dynamite (or so studios believe), so as the crew of 6 astronauts approach Europa they fall into increasingly critical misfortunes that threaten their mission and their lives. The movie is foreshadowed by an "executive" talking to the camera, documentary style about the mission and you get the sense something went wrong. Most of the movie is then shown through lost-footage style clips showing bits and pieces of the long journey and the events on Europa. This seems to be a common trope now as it is similar in the style to Apollo 18. Not only is the footage spliced together out of order so you don't get a full understanding of the events until later, but they use a lot of creepy noise effects and interference at times to make it seem "spookier" I guess. I still think Moon did the best job in recent years, to tell a story in space without devolving into a sub-genre of typical horror films, and just having normal drama in a science fiction setting (yes the premise for Moon isn't that realistic). In any case, I don't think it is a huge spoiler, given the trailers for this movie, to tell that things don't ultimately end well for the entire crew.

Thera Macula (false color) on Europa. Credit: Paul Schenk/NASA

Other than the style, I found the characters and story were pretty good, the effects were pretty good overall and didn't seem like overuse of CGI and they did have some weightlessness scenes. The scenes in orbit around Jupiter and Europa were quite impressive, makes you wish we really were going there. There were no explosions in space, super AI, fusion reactors or any other really exaggerated technology. The ship had a rotating living section to simulate gravity which they spent most of their time in. Once they get to Europa they send a large section of the craft down as a lander which will then drill through the ice and hopefully reach the under-ice lake or ocean in order to search for life. That is the plan anyway.

Europa Report currently has a 69% fresh rating on Rotten Tomatoes. Overall I enjoyed the movie. It's probably worth a Netflix rental, rather than paying $9.99 for it.

spoiler alert!

 Stop reading if you don't want critical pieces of the movie spoiled for you.

While the Europa Report was pretty good, but the "science" part of the plot kept reminding me of List of things I did not care for in Prometheus. Basically it comes down to: "We are going to go halfway across the solar system, for the first time in humanity, but as soon as we get there we have no ability to actual get any scientific research done without being eaten by monsters". One the main claims to fame this movie has is the supposed realism and authenticity of the mission. I feel their hearts were in the right places, and it's basically a movie about every space geek's fantasy about what might be on Europa, but they fell into too convenient plot devices I found hard to swallow, despite enjoying the movie.

Among my issues with the plot:

• No redundancy of communications... what!? Isn't that the most important thing for a mission to another planet/moon? Not to mention they apparently did have a way to repair it, but chose not to until the very end. Oh and genius idea that the life-support subsystem can swap parts with the communication subsystem.
• No redundancy of their drilling probe? They lose one and all is lost. They can't improvise a camera on a pole and look under the ice?
• Apparently, there was no firm plan to have the crew explore the ice surface after landing, no radiation protection, no way to deal with hazards of walking on ice, no vehicles to use other than walking. Why send humans at all in that case?
• When they do send a scientist outside, they have no safety harnesses, they don't use a buddy system like mountain climbers (were the Apollo astronauts ever alone?). Let alone have any sort of a rescue plan i.e. a jet-pack or other person suited up ready to go out in an emergency. Maybe flotation devices might be useful on a planet with liquid water? For that matter, I wonder how buoyant a space suit is with low gravity, since I believe in those neutral buoyancy tanks on Earth they weigh down the suits with additional weight. She basically sinks like a stone in falling through the ice, they don't even bother to go after her, but it's implied she is eaten/killed by the monster. This is like horror movie 101 stuff, never go out alone, never walk towards the mysterious light.
  
• So they go all the way to land on Europa and they don't have a reliable way to go outside, so you would think the lander would have all sorts of robotic arms, scoops and other sensors to get as much science, like any other lander NASA has ever sent to another world, but other than the one drill probe, apparently not. Wouldn't a major effort be to take back "Europa-rocks" of ice samples or whatever they can find and bring back to Earth for research?
• You would think to support such a mission there would be a network of probes either in orbit around Europa or in the Jovian system which would be taking images of them and the landing site (maybe to see aerial view of the "lights" they are so desperate to see up close), able to relay communications, etc.. Like we have on Mars now with NASA's MRO
• 6 crew all the way to Europa and only 2 scientists doing anything while they are there.
• They didn't exactly explain how long they planned to live on Europa, similar to some missions to Mars, the return window is some length of time away, so they need to have some semi-permanent base to live and work out of for an extended stay. For Mars exploration there are ideas to send unmanned supply/cargo craft that would already be there on the moon for them to use to set up some sort of base. It didn't look like they had any plan like this, and it seemed like they had an all or nothing EVA to get scientific data before trying to come home? It wasn't clear if the rapid take off was due to the crew death's or because they weren't going to stay long anyway.

Maybe the idea (I doubt the writers even thought this far ahead) was that the mission was really just a "plant the flag" expedition to Europa, without much plan for hard science, but to promote the Europa Ventures company. Something like the quick and dirty ways they could get to Mars really fast without doing anything useful while there. But then again, they probably wouldn't need 6 crew for that. On the other hand, the one thing they did have redundancy for was the lives of the crew!

Some unresolved questions or plot points, and maybe I just missed them:

Why couldn't they leave theAndrei in the orbiter? Not that it mattered I guess, did they imply he had radiation poisoning or just that he was depressed?

 

Why did that male scientist die at the end, did he just fall because of an "ice quake" or did the monsters get him?

 

Hopefully the monsters' ecosystem isn't waiting for spacecraft to land, be attracted to their lights and fall through the ice so they can be eaten. They would get very hungry.

 

Wasn't the monster creature attracted to light almost directly taken from Arthur C. Clarke's "2061: Odyssey Three"?

 

It was implied that there was some connection between radioactivity interference and the monsters, could be interesting if there were alien life that could somehow use radiation in the environment directly as a food or heat source. But this was never really "answered" within the movie.