“The Silent Planet” is a sci-fi allegory that attempts to take the pulse of the human condition in our current, fear-immigrants moment and doesn’t quite come off.
One can appreciate the cleverness of seeing The Tablelands in Canada’s Gros Morne National Park as an alien world and some (but not all) of the sci-fi world-building-on-a-budget. But the script looks for universalities, loss, crimes and redemption or at least “tests” of humanity that it almost finds but never quite grasps.
Elias Koteas, a veteran of “The Last Days on Mars,” “The Baker” and “Chicago P.D.” is Theodore, an aged miner sentenced to this out-world where he digs up valuable ore which he’s able to electrically launch into a vehicle in low atmosphere orbit. He lives in the living-pod quarters stage of an atmospheric entry vehicle.
It’s implied that Theodore is the lone miner on this low-oxygen planet or planetoid (Europa?). For all the expense and tech it took to get him and those who proceded him –one at a time — there, his tools are a hammer, a chisel and a wheel barrow. The entry vehicle he plunged to the surface on had him strapped into a transparent bubble that forces him to face the searing flames and heat of hurtling downward. All part of his punishment?
Let’s take a moment to be thankful the writer-director didn’t call the mineral “unobtainium.”
Theodore mutters to himself through his days, writes and watches the sitcom “Roomies” at night during the 14 hour days. For some reason, he removes the life monitor planted in his chest. His overseers assume he’s dead. For some other reason, Theodore keeps mining and making his deposits into orbit.
Niyya (Briana Middleton of “Sharper” and “The Tender Bar”) is sent to replace him before anybody figures out the other guy is still there, just crazy.
Earth has been visited by aliens called the Oieans, designed and attired like creatures straight out of 1960s era “Doctor Who.” The planet has been less than welcoming of these interplanetary refugees. That’s how Niyya, raised by Oieans, got into trouble and was sentenced to work on thise mines.
“F— Humanity!” she’s scribbled in her journal, which Theodore promptly swipes rather than welcoming his new “company.” He’s paranoid, and he has his reasons. She’s paranoid and she has hers. At least she got Oiean advice as a child that might help her cope with her future.
“You can climb to the top of the world, but you can’t climb above yourself.”
Not sure if that’s as helpful as they make out. On a world with low oxygen, with a crazed fellow criminal your only company and rolling, sentient purple fog that reads your thoughts and turns them against you, “the silence will crush you.” Can these two just get along?
The clumsy arbitrariness of the plot, the “rules” of this world and the limits the story imposes which characters sometimes ignore undercut any “reality” we’re meant to buy into. Flashbacks, even those with nudity and murky evidence of past crimes, don’t illuminate much.
The actors are pretty much stranded in the The Tablelands with a static plot, spacesuit costumes, the flimsiest fake survival without O2 gear ever budgeted and most everything — wheel barrows included — sourced at nearby Deer Lake’s Home Hardware.
You don’t need a lot of Canadian money to pull off science fiction. But you do need to at least let us see what the actors must have seen in the script in the finished product.
Rating: TV-16+, violence, nudity, profanity
Cast: Elias Koteas, Briana Middleton and Courtney Lancaster.
Credits: Scripted and directed by Jeffrey St. Jules. A Quiver release on Amazon Prime.
Running time: 1:35
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