815. Love (2011)

Starring: Gunner Wright, Corey Richardson, Bradley Horne

Director: William Eubank

Running Time: 84 mins

Love is an American film about an International Space Station worker who finds himself stranded alone, without contact to the outside world, on the station, and as he begins to lose sanity, he has an epiphany as to the importance of love and relations in the life of humanity.

Ok, there are two main things to say about this film, one positive, one negative. On the plus side, this is a hugely impressive film for its low budget of just $500,000, with special effects to rival those of any big-money blockbuster, a dazzling score and impressive set design. On the downside, however, this film is an extremely pretentious, slow-paced and incredibly dull look at humanity, and whilst I understand that the themes were so complex, it wasn’t well-written enough to entice me nonetheless.

We’ll start with that point, that this film is just pretentious. It harks back to many other ‘human exploration/epiphany’ films, Moon, The Fountain and 2001: A Space Odyssey to name a few. Now, I was not at all a fan of Moon and The Fountain, due to their ridiculously slow pacing, and, particularly with regards to The Fountain, were highly pretentious and totally incomprehensible, and this film has an almost identical feel to it, which was very frustrating for me to watch.

The problem with this story is that, whilst it has a huge degree of potential, and a highly interesting central theme, is that it can’t execute its intelligence in an entertaining and/or interesting-enough way, and despite all of the impressive music and visuals, for an average movie watcher, this is totally inaccessible and hugely boring.

One of the other things that annoyed me was how ridiculously similar this film looks to 2001. Now, that was a beautiful looking film, and it had the intrigue and well-written screenplay to go with it, which was why I did ‘enjoy’ it (no-one can really enjoy A Space Odyssey), but in this film, there are some scenes and images that are almost completely copied from 2001, that were almost unnecessary and very distracting. However, I read the perfect synopsis for this film online after watching it: ‘Imagine the end bit of Space Odyssey (which was pretty long anyway) dragged out for an hour and a half’, because that’s what this film is.

On the other hand, I have to commend this film for what it does with its low budget. To create something that is genuinely visually (not emotionally) spectacular, as well as having a very appropriate and pleasant score with this little money was so impressive, and the fact that the whole ISS set is just a box built in someone’s back garden is something else that is absolutely amazing to think about.

Anyway, overall, this gets a 5.0, because despite being clever with its money, this film is too clever with its themes and not clever enough with making good pacing and interesting watching.