Scifi haunted space station9/9/2023 ![]() Exactly when and why this happens, and how it differs from the previous state of affairs, viewers have to piece together from silent, ineloquent reaction shots and snatches of vague, hand-waving exposition. Obviously things are dire down there, but at some point, they get suddenly and catastrophically worse, as a boiling cloud of poison races around the planet, seemingly eliminating all human life. The situation on Earth is particularly unclear. Things settle a little when half the crew (including Dimitri’s son) departs the station and Lauritsch can focus on the three who remain: Hannah, Gavin, and Dimitri. The international cast, who occasionally dip into subtitled German and Russian, are all at sea, and the audience is left confused about the particulars. Lauritsch and her co-screenwriter Jessica Lind fail to take the time to properly set up the characters, the world, the plot, and the stakes. In its early phases, the script seems in a hurry to go nowhere. In these moments, Rubikon is at its fleeting best.Īs a drama, the film is much less sure-footed. Several times during the movie, she shows she can build and release tension with unflashy economy, using spare edits and letting the actors and the sound design do the heavy lifting. Accompanying Hannah is Gavin Abbott (George Blagden), a chemist and environmental activist whose rich parents arranged the gig on the Rubikon for him, seeing space as a safe haven.Īt the very start of the film, something happens to the AI navigation system of Hannah and Gavin’s shuttlecraft, forcing them to dock with the station manually - for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate both Hannah’s military competence and sang-froid, and Lauritsch’s sure hand as a director with suspense set-pieces. Hannah Wagner (Julia Franz Richter), a special-ops soldier for one of these companies, is posted to the Rubikon, a large, well-appointed space station with a small crew, where the scientist Dimitri Krylow (Mark Ivanir) has been developing a symbiotic system of algae cultures that can provide a limitless supply of breathable air. The film is set in 2056, when air quality is so degraded that the upper echelons of society live in climate-controlled geodomes, and society has crumbled to the extent that nations have dissolved and been replaced by corporate entities. ![]() The trouble is, its metaphor is so starkly exaggerated, with the future of humanity on one side of the scale and three people in a tin can on the other, that it never fully makes sense. ![]() On a moral level, however - and this is very much a morality play in the guise of a contained, pressure-cooker thriller - it’s about weighing your responsibility to yourself and your family against your responsibility to society. On an emotional level, Rubikon is a film about how isolation breeds insular attitudes, and how easy it is for your horizons to shrink, even when you can see the curvature of the Earth from your bedroom window. But as she was shooting during the second wave of coronavirus, the parallels became inescapable for her and her actors, and they’re inescapable for viewers now. And Leni Lauritsch, the first-time director, wrote the film before the pandemic, with topics like global climate change and the European refugee crisis on her mind. Rubikon’s tiny cast and minimal production probably have more to do with its budget and origin (it’s Austrian-made, though mostly in English) than when it was made. They feel like they ought to go down to the surface and try to save humanity, but they’re not sure they can bring themselves to leave the safety of their orbiting cocoon. There, a handful of characters - just three, for most of the film’s length - stare out of their windows at a world that’s choking to death on toxic fog. ![]() The stakes don’t get much bigger or the canvas much smaller than in Rubikon, a sci-fi drama about the fate of the Earth, set aboard an orbiting space station.
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