{"id":1641,"date":"2012-01-19T03:25:34","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T03:25:34","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=1641"},"modified":"2014-06-24T18:04:29","modified_gmt":"2014-06-24T17:04:29","slug":"love","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/?p=1641","title":{"rendered":"LOVE"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"\"<\/a>Somewhere in the heart of Love<\/em> is a very good short film being brutally battered to death by a writer\/director intent on driving home his \u201cVERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE\u201d without subtlety. That\u2019s not to say that there aren\u2019t good things in Love<\/em>, but you have to work to dig them out from a film that is almost buried beneath a landslide of indulgence, borrowed imagery and sloppy thinking.<\/p>\n

Love<\/em> is the story of an astronaut, Captain Miller, abandoned on the International Space Station in 2045 as a mysterious disaster engulfs the planet below. Miller is forced to come to terms with the fact that there will be no rescue and then try to cope with the extreme isolation. There\u2019s a subplot that features an American Civil War Union soldier who escapes certain death in a bloody battle when he is sent to investigate something strange in the wilderness. The action in the film is also intercut with faux interviews of people opining about their experience of the wonders of love and the importance of relationships.<\/p>\n

Newcomer Gunnar Wright (previous credits include a handful of TV shows and a lead voice in the videogame Dead Space 2<\/em>) carries the film as Miller with remarkable poise. For much of the film he\u2019s on screen alone and he manages to be convincing as the practical astronaut in the opening sequences and, as Milller\u2019s moods slips from confusion through anger to desperation, Wright portrays the character\u2019s disintegration with a commendable but affecting restraint. The temptation to slip into histrionics and a welter of actorly tics must have been very tempting but Love<\/em> is stronger for Wright\u2019s stillness.<\/p>\n

Love <\/em>also looks good. Cinematographer, and first-time writer\/director, William Eubank obviously had a very clear vision for what he was trying to achieve with this movie and he manages to maintain a strong visual style on what is clearly a limited budget.<\/p>\n

But it is the effort to maintain this visual gloss that marks the point where Love<\/em> starts to falter. It is all very well that director Eubank should seek to reference Kubrick\u2019s 2001: A Space Odyssey<\/em> in his movie, he\u2019d hardly be the first director to do so, but there are sequences when Love<\/em> goes beyond allusion or reference. Indeed there are passages that might have been lifted directly from Kubrick\u2019s work \u2013 if Kubrick had been sloppier and less talented. Where, for example, Kubrick went to extraordinary lengths to get the presentation of spaceflight as realistic as possible, Eubank can\u2019t be bothered (or perhaps couldn\u2019t afford) to maintain such rigour (there\u2019s normal gravity aboard the ISS, the space shuttle is still flying in 2045) or avoid plot inconsistencies (a magically repairing life support system, a disappearing space shuttle that leaves a desperate Miller contemplating trying to return home in a spacesuit). \u00a0One might overlook these errors in a film that did not take so much, so blatantly, from Kubrick\u2019s superior work but Eubank, in taking as his template a movie that is so fervent in its attention to detail, invites comparisons that cannot help but bring into the sharpest focus every shortcoming in his film.<\/p>\n

Love\u2019s<\/em> greatest failing, however, is that while it strives for profundity and ambiguity, it is actually a rather one-dimensional and obvious film that batters the viewer with its simplistic message.<\/p>\n

All the trippy visuals in the world can\u2019t disguise the fact that the intellectual payload that they\u2019re seeking to deliver is nothing more profound or original than the rather bland admonishment that \u201cpeople need people\u201d. This homely homily is rammed home at every opportunity during the film. It is in the (over-used) narration, in the faux interviews (distractingly reminiscent of sequences in Rob Reiner\u2019s When Harry Met Sally<\/em>) and by an extraordinary music track\/voiceover that plays as the credits roll and actually instructs the audience on the moral of the film and how they should feel as they leave the cinema.[i]<\/a><\/p>\n

Here, again, Love\u2019s<\/em> shortcomings are particularly painfully exposed because it draws attention to the debt it owes better, more subtle, movies \u2013 not just 2001<\/em>, but also Solaris<\/em> (although it’s more Soderbergh than Tarkovsky) and Moon<\/em>.<\/p>\n

Last year was a pretty extraordinary year for art house sf \u2013 Malick\u2019s wonderful The Tree of Life<\/em>, von Trier\u2019s complex, beautiful but vile Melancholia<\/em> and the artful Another World<\/em> all made their own impact. Love <\/em>is not in their league. While its visuals are often strong, it is intellectually and emotionally slight in comparison. Love<\/em> is not, however, a total disaster. Had Eubank exercised a little more restraint in his wholesale homage <\/em>to older, better, movies the flaws in his debut would probably not have seemed so stark and its strengths might have been better served.<\/p>\n

Love<\/em> was, at least in part, conceived as an extended promotional video for an album by the American band Angels and Airwaves[ii]<\/a> and there\u2019s a distinct sense that the weaknesses of the film stem from its origin as a vanity project or, at least, from the indulgence of a friend (Eubank is a childhood friend of the band). Even at just over 80 minutes there are times when Love<\/em> feels slow because Eubank can\u2019t resist another montage or trippy visual trick. Despite its origins the film doesn\u2019t work particularly well as a promotional tool for the band\u2019s music because, apart from the irritating tracks over the credits, the soundtrack is so minimalist that it almost disappears completely. It\u2019s hard to imagine Love<\/em> selling many records.<\/p>\n

Nevertheless, Love<\/em> is certainly worth checking out on DVD (a Region One disc is available with the Angels and Airwaves CD Deluxe Box Set<\/a>), after all how many attempts at serious SF, however flawed, do film fans get to experience each year? Still it\u2019s a shame the writer\/director couldn\u2019t deliver a film that stood on its own merits more successfully.<\/p>\n


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[i]<\/a> At times Love <\/em>feels like being trapped back in the late 80s with a loved-up raver who, driven by an E too many and the mistaken assumption that a similar taste in music implies a similar reckless disregard for personal space, believes that everything would be better if we all gave each other a great big hug. I\u2019m not denying the importance of healthy interpersonal relationships, but everyone having someone to love isn\u2019t going to solve the world\u2019s problems any more than bouncing around a field in Essex, locked in a sweaty embrace, while Ebeneezer Good<\/em> by The Shamen plays for the seventh time that night was about to bring down Thatcher, mate. I\u2019m sure Josephine, Eva, Nadezhda\u00a0 and Khieu all provided comforting shoulders and caring private spaces for their husbands but it didn\u2019t stop their men all being rampaging bastards, did it?<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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[ii]<\/a> Nope, I\u2019d never heard of them either. Apparently one of them used to be in Blink 182.<\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Somewhere in the heart of Love is a very good short film being brutally battered to death by a writer\/director intent on driving home his \u201cVERY IMPORTANT MESSAGE\u201d without subtlety. That\u2019s not to say that there aren\u2019t good things in Love, but you have to work to dig them out from a film that is […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":1642,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_is_tweetstorm":false,"jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false}}},"categories":[22],"tags":[51,47,46],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/wp-content\/uploads\/2012\/01\/love.jpg","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/s27AP7-love","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641"}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=1641"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2630,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1641\/revisions\/2630"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/1642"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=1641"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=1641"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.mmcgrath.co.uk\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=1641"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}