Crew
Director/Screenplay – Jeffrey St. Jules, Producers – Andrew Bronfman & Mark O’Neill, Photography – Paul Sarossy, Music – Darren Fung, Visual Effects – Vitamin VFX (Supervisor – Justin Bunt), Production Design – Andrew Berry. Production Company – Jobro Productions/Telefilm Canada/The Canada Media Fund/PictureNL.
Cast
Elias Koteas (Theodore), Briana Middleton (Niyya), Courtney Ch’ng Lancaster (Mona)
Plot
Earth has made contact with the Oiean aliens, many of which have settled on Earth. Convicted of a crime on Earth, Theodore has been sentenced to a remote planet where he is to dig supplies of a mineral. His memory has wandered in his solitary existence, but he believes he may have been sentenced for murder. He is now informed by his A.I. that a new arrival on the way and his sentence is due to end. Realising that this means his death, he cuts out the device monitoring his vitals, leaving the system to assume he is dead or near dying. A habitat lands nearby containing Niyya who has been sentenced as a terrorist. The two broach a cautious friendship as Theodore finally finds someone to break the loneliness on the planet.
I first encountered Canadian director Jeffrey St. Jules several years back with his feature-length directorial debut Bang Bang Baby (2014), an exaggerated parody of a 1950s rock‘n’roll film that became increasingly surrealistic. Most audiences walked out but I quite liked it. St. Jules next made the little-seen thriller Cinema of Sleep (2021), before returning with The Silent Planet.
The theme of the prison planet has turned up in various works of science-fiction before, most notedly Alien3 (1992). There have been other occasional works such as Spacerage: Breakout on Prison Planet (1987), Moon 44 (1990), New Eden (1994) and Science Fiction Volume One: The Osiris Child (2016). Most of these have taken an action emphasis, siding with a group of prisoners against a cruel, authoritarian system or in the case of Alien3 against an invading alien.
At complete contrast, The Silent Planet has no interest in defying what would seem to be a quite authoritarian and dystopian system – minimal explanation is given of the scenario on Earth, while we only briefly get to see the aliens that are referenced throughout. Indeed, the aliens are the case of a Chekov’s Gun being introduced, leading one to believe they have something to do with the plot only to be of no significance at all. Even the reality warping fog, which seems a holdover from Bang Bang Baby, is introduced but nothing done with it.
The title The Silent Planet led one to the face value expectation that they might be in for an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet (1938), which Lewis wrote as a Christian response to H.G. Wells showing the exploration of an allegorised solar system. That proves not to be the case. However. is it not entirely clear what The Silent Planet is about. The idea of the prison planet is very different to other works on the topic – where are all of the abovementioned are films that feature inmates vs something (an alien or the system), this seems to be a film about loneliness. It is not always clear what is going on – it took nearly half-an-hour into the film before I could grasp the basic set-up – the talk of aliens, exiles, why Elias Koteas is firing rocks into orbit, what him pulling his monitor out means, why Briana Middleton was arrested. Much is teased and elliptically hinted at, but nothing pointed out.
Elias Koteas is an actor who I think does not get nearly enough the respect he is due and has given phenomenal performances in films like Crash (1996) and his work with Atom Egoyan. He is expectedly great here – now into his sixties and cast an old man living in solitude. He is well balanced at the youthful end by Briana Middleton. There are one or two people who appear in a couple of scenes, but the film is just the two of them together on screen in a bare, wide-open landscape for the entire running time and a plot about their slow building of trust and connection. This works not too badly even if the dialogue is often very quiet and you are straining to hear what is being said.
Trailer here