The Silent Planet: Canadian Low-Budget Sci-Fi Goes the Distance
By Chris Knight
Rating: A-
The Silent Planet is, at first glance, an ungainly pile of science-fiction tropes and platitudes that has no right to gel into anything cohesive or interesting. But do give it a second glance, because it does just that.
Consider that the film begins with an on-screen quotation in a guttural alien language, like something out of Dune. It imagines a future Earth that has become home to a group of alien refugees, not unlike District 9. It uses a scrubby desert (in Newfoundland!) to stand in for an alien planet, which we’ve seen in Star Wars, Star Trek, Planet of the Apes and many more.
Even its title recalls such mid-century movies as Fantastic Planet, Forbidden Planet or Voyage to Prehistoric Planet. The Silent Planet also has a Strangelovian also-title: The Sad Dreams of Earthlings.
But the movie overcomes all these would-be pitfalls, thanks to a whip-smart screenplay from director Jeffrey St. Jules, engagingly delivered by the film’s two stars, Elias Koteas and Briana Middleton.
Koteas plays Theodore, who has been marooned on an uninhabited planet for a presumably heinous crime and spends his days mining some kind of unobtanium while having one-sided conversations with his wife, who is back on Earth. One senses that, if he wasn’t off his rocker when he landed on this rock, the solitude has pushed him over the edge.
When Theodore learns he is terminally ill, he cuts the bio-sensor out of his chest. Since he now registers as dead, Earth’s penal system sends Niyya (Middleton), a new prisoner, to take his place.
What follows is a series of long and distrustful meetings between the two, with a lot of unreliable narration from both. Niyya says she was charged with attempted terrorism and complains that it was entrapment; she never actually did anything. Theodore claims he was falsely convicted of murder, though memories in flashback suggest otherwise.
It’s basically a two-hander, but St. Jules doesn’t skimp on the tertiary background details. This includes the alien race that is now living on Earth alongside humans, and some future tech that clearly involved more planning than: “How do we transmit this piece of information?”
My favourite in the latter category is Janie (Alex Paxton-Beesley), an Alexa-type voice assistant that seems like it might provide a degree of company for Niyya, until it informs her that she’s used up all her personal dialogue prompts and can now only ask questions of an official nature. Oh well.
Then there’s Theodore’s “8V Generative TV,” a smart set capable of creating horrible, poorly written sitcoms on the fly. Ask it for a show about two strangers forced to share an apartment and it will deliver a schlocky comedy, complete with laugh track. It was a fascinating nugget of imaginative technology. And I hope it never becomes an actual device. That’s not a future anyone should want.
The Silent Planet. Directed by Jeffrey St. Jules. Starring Elias Koteas and Briana Middleton. Opens March 7 at the Carlton cinema in Toronto, digitally, and on demand.