Those who have known me for a long time, who have really gotten to know me, know that I have a deep-seated love of story. Not a preference for fiction or nonfiction, not a preference for the medium that it exists in, but for the way that it progresses, the way that the viewpoint on display interacts with the events being discussed to create a unique narrative. The best authors, in my opinion, are the ones who can tap into that aspect of story, who can display an understanding of how to craft a viewpoint as well as a narrative sequence.
Michael Zapata shows a skill in this ability in
The Lost Book of Adana Moreau, a book that I went into with an expectation that it was going to be science-fiction flavored, but instead found something much more interesting. While nothing in the book exists anywhere outside of realism, there's an almost dreamlike, magical-realist quality to the way that the story's characters drift through the events on display. At the same time, however, this is a story about trauma, about loss, about exile, about moving forward after losing someone irreplaceable, after losing your home and the safety it represents.
At its core, this novel is about storytelling. Jumping back and forth between events in the 1930s and 2005, the core narrative deals with the titular "lost book". Adana Moreau, a character whose literal presence ends less than a fifth of the way through the book, is a Dominican refugee living in New Orleans after escaping the conflict that took her parents during the United States occupation of the Dominican Republic. While she speaks no English when she reaches Louisiana, with the help of her husband (a literal pirate whose name is never given), her son Maxwell (an avid reader with a severe case of wanderlust), and a librarian, she is able to teach herself the language, becoming quite fond of the early science fiction that would have been available at the time (specific examples include Yevgeny Zamyatin's We, Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, and some of the works of H.P. Lovecraft).
After finding a newspaper article about Percy Fawcett, who disappeared while searching for an ancient lost city that he believed to exist in the Brazilian rainforest, Adana gets the idea to write her own science fiction novel, Lost City, which is described and summarized as being an early example of post-apocalyptic fiction, influenced in large part by her own life story and what she had read of Fawcett's story, dealing with the search for lost cities and eventually with parallel universes. She is tapped to write a sequel, A Model Earth, but after completing it, she becomes ill, and decides to destroy the manuscript before it's published. Her son has read the unpublished novel, though, so it lives on through him.
After Adana's story ends, the narrative jumps forward to late 2004, and the viewpoint changes to Saul Drower, an Israeli living in Chicago who cares for his grandfather, and who immigrated to the United States in his childhood after his parents were killed by Fatah militants in the Coastal Road massacre. After his grandfather's death, he is given a package that he's instructed to send to Maxwell Moreau, a theoretical physicist specializing in the theory of parallel universes at the Universidad de Chile in Santiago. However, Moreau has retired, left Santiago, and did not leave a forwarding address, so the box is returned. Opening it to see what the heavy package was, Saul finds a 926-page manuscript for A Model Earth by Adana Moreau.
Enlisting the help of his lifelong friend Javier Silva, a journalist who has been reporting on protests and human rights issues in South America and Mexico but returned for a new job at the Chicago Tribune, Saul is able, after a number of months, to track down Maxwell's new address in New Orleans. Packages to New Orleans are not being shipped, due to events in August 2005, decides that he needs to hand-deliver it.
From there, the book shifts back and forth between the stories of Saul and Javier's search through the wreckage of Hurricane Katrina for Maxwell, and Maxwell's childhood experiences growing up in New Orleans and Chicago. At the same time, the underlying story of where Saul's manuscript came from is slowly revealed, only becoming totally clear when everything finally comes together at the end.
If the book was just about these characters, it would be interesting enough... but there's more to it. Saul's grandfather was a historian who showed a particular ability to get people he interviewed to open up and tell their stories, always nudging them on with a "Tell me more" sort of prompt. Throughout the novel, there are brief interludes, always several pages long, where a character tells a story about their history, about how they came to be where they are, about who and where they have lost and how they have coped with those losses. These stories range from a man who was a translator for the Bolsheviks in 1910s Petrograd fleeing to America, to a Sicilian WWII soldier's long-buried wartime memories, to a Chilean widow in the early 2000s searching for evidence of the fates of her family members who were "disappeared" by the Pinochet regime.
The theory of parallel universes appears commonly as well, with Saul in particular thinking about all the worlds where things happened differently, where he was with his parents when they were killed, or where they had taken a different bus and he grew up in Israel, or where Argentine dictator Jorge Rafael Videla suffered a brain injury as a child and never rose to power... all the possibilities that can be explored but which we can never know the full ramifications of, as they didn't happen in our universe, our timeline.
That, then, becomes the true message of the book: we can't know or experience how things might have gone differently, but dwelling on that makes loss meaningless. We can move forward after a loss, though. We can learn from the past, and remember our losses, but we can also make new lives, and make the most of what we still have, even in the face of the unimaginable. Just as New Orleans, in the fifteen years since the hurricane, has bounced back from that destruction and reclaimed its heritage as the thriving cultural center it was, we as people can do the same.
A very strong work to come out in the Year of Covid, to say the least. The entire world is being reshaped by loss on a scale unseen in most lifetimes, whether or not people want to admit that it's real. This has been the year that showed what damage ignoring an impending disaster, an ongoing disaster, can wreak; the way we move forward from that is to learn from the experience, to let it shape but not stop culture, and to remember.
To start things off: That view of Earth, toward the end. I loved that, it was very cool to look at, but... well, that was not a happy planet. Of course, I saw it coming a mile off that the whole thing would be brown; if there's one thing that was made crystal clear by the graphics and exposition early in the film, it's that whatever happened was radiation-based and was absolutely going to kill everything on the surface of the planet. It's all cooked. Maybe not everything in the seas, that's hard to say (though that sequence on the ice floes makes more sense if heating the seas is somehow a factor). But certainly it's a mass extinction event. Now, that's not to say it's going to last forever. Earth has undergone some pretty crazy stuff in its past... but every time it does, there's a mass extinction, and the largest, dominant species tend to be the ones that go away. And those awful-looking radiation storms would need to die down.
Anyways. We've got two plotlines essentially running in parallel here, with one... well, rather more reasonable than the other. The first, and probably most interesting, is Augustine Lofthouse at the North Pole. Well, not precisely the north pole, but close enough to work for our needs. He's terminally ill (with what, we aren't told; whatever's being done with his blood looks an awful lot like dialysis, but the word "transfusion" is dropped in the starting exposition, so... ¯\_(ツ)_/¯ ), and chose to stay behind at the research base he's working from when everyone else left to be with their families or try to find somewhere to hide from the radiation. It's implied that his reason for staying back is to try to communicate with the Aether, a manned ship making the return from an expedition to one of Jupiter's moons that's potentially life-sustaining (which doesn't actually exist, and I'm not sure how they figure we would have missed something big enough to maintain an atmosphere in all the time since Galileo noticed those little moving dots, but... suspend disbelief, it's just a movie, and all that), and... tell them not to come home? There's a lot to be nitpicked about this, but we'll deal with that a little later.
Augustine is rather surprised, three weeks into his lonely vigil, to find a young girl, Iris, who was apparently left behind, and who doesn't talk. He tries to call for someone to come get her, but nobody's picking up. Of course not; the radiation has wrecked everywhere except the polar regions and it's getting close there, too. Begrudgingly, he decides he's going to have to take care of her as well as he can in what little time is left for the planet. OK, cool, it's a movie about a grumpy old dude learning to lighten up a bit, right?
Well, kind of, but we don't get much of that (besides a silly pea-fight scene). Because he's not getting through to the Aether, so we have to make an icy road trip to a station a bit farther north that has a bigger dish. More power, that'll fix it! Can't possibly be all the radiation in the atmosphere that's messing up the reception. So it's time to bundle up the kid, stuff the dialysis machine in a backpack, hop on a snowmobile with a trailer full of supplies, and head out into the ice and snow. And here we get what strikes me as a *major* issue. Before they head out, Augustine steps outside and finds a bunch of dying birds on the ground all over the place, and says to himself that the radiation shouldn't be that far north yet. When he and Iris set out soon afterward, he gives her a breathing mask of some kind and tells her that she needs to only breathe through that when they're outside. So... how is a breathing mask going to protect you from radiation? No clue, and I don't know that I saw the mask again after that scene, to be honest. Guess it wasn't really that important after all.
The trip to the farther-north station essentially has three legs, as far as the events we see in the film are concerned. The first ends with the two finding a crashed personal jet. Some rich dude thought flying north would save him? Who knows. The guy has no lines besides what sounded a bit like a gasped out "kill me" and whatever he whispered to Augustine right at the end. He's pretty messed up, anyways. Radiation burns are evident on his face, this guy's a goner, Augustine uses what honestly looks like a 3D-printed rifle (or at the very least it's a 3D-printed stock) to mercy-kill him. After, of course, Iris has wandered into the plane just far enough to get Augustine's attention and he yells at her to get back outside. No sense in letting her see this.
The next sequence has them racing north, and Iris notices some structures out in the distance, alerting Augustine by way of a shoulder-nudge. There, we find some small pre-fab cabins left by a Norwegian expedition, so hey, somewhere out of the elements to stay for the night. That's good, we don't need to set up the tent or anything! Of course, Murphy's Law of apocalyptic films decides to make a visit, and he wakes up in the middle of the night to find himself in icy water. The cabins were actually on ice that's now started to crack, and the structure's starting to sink, and the door's stuck shut because it fell down enough to be blocked by the ice sheet. So we bust out the window, get Iris out, and oh wait, the dialysis machine's floating back there at the wrong end of the cabin. So, back into the water, grab that, and climb back out just as the thing goes into the water for reals. And... wait, now the snowmobile's starting to go, too! Better get on there and gun it, and... somehow, the treads can't get traction and that goes into the water, too! With the dialysis machine? And it's sinking too fast to recover, so it's time to just climb out. So... what are we left with? Two people, one of whom is completely soaked, in the middle of a frozen lake.
So, let's examine this for a moment. Those prefabs had clearly been there for a while, there's no reason the ice should have just suddenly broken unless the sheet was thinning, which would mean the water had heated up. Hello, radiation! But wait, it's still ice and snow outside. And unless I'm mistaken, the air would be heating up and snow turning to rain a lot sooner than the water would be heating up enough to make the ice brittle enough for this. It makes no sense that I can think of; bodies of water tend to be slower to change temperature than the air outside. Given that the radiation is going to be coming via air faster than through bedrock from the southern areas, this just plain doesn't work. The ice isn't going to thin if the air temperature is below freezing.
Anyways, now we have to trek north, somehow warming Augustine enough to not freeze to death overnight, over at least two nights in fact, and through an outright blizzard where he gets separated from Iris (though somehow she finds him again on the other side) to reach the northern research station, so he can place his ultra-long-distance phone call. At this point, it's probably best to just ignore that the guy who's terminally ill and needs daily dialysis is somehow making it all the way there on what has got to be sheer force of will, because no way are we in realism at this point.
We'll come back to Augustine and the northern research station when the phone rings at Aether. We're basically done with his journey (though I'll have more to say later in this piece, as the denouement for him comes when communications are finally established and conversation can be had). For now, just remember: I did enjoy this movie, I just also see the places where it's playing a bit fast and loose with science, which does bug me a little, but I appreciate the story on display here. And really, when we get right down to it, the Aether plot is really just serving to illuminate Augustine's story, so... yeah.
Off to space, then. Our first time meeting any of the Aether crew is the apparent protagonist on this plot, Sully, one of five members of the expedition. We see her exploring a lichen-filled cave with fresh water, on our alien planet, without any space suit of any sort on. Clearly, there aren't any dangerous pathogens that are hazardous to human health on our never-explored-before-this-crew-got-here moon, and there's no worries being made about contaminating a thriving ecosystem with anything we might have brought with us, because everything here looks just like Earth, except the plants are red instead of green, and the sky is filled with Jupiter. OK, then. She's left behind when the crew leaves.... oh, but it was a dream. Still, a pretty neat way to introduce the concept. No, we're not at Jupiter anymore, we're four years into the mission, and most of the way back from that planet. Maybe we're four years into the return trip entirely. It wasn't 100% clear from the on-screen graphic (which was background color anyways, but it was words so I read them, dang it), but I'm going to say, just based on my knowledge of space and travel times and such, that we're well inside Mars orbit at this point. So, y'know... we've been headed home for a while.
Oh, and apparently even though there's only five people on the crew (three male, two female), Sully has paired off with the pilot because she's pregnant enough to be showing. I'm sure this isn't something that's just... a thing that is barely going to be touched on in the film at all. Seriously, it's used as an excuse for a third person going on the spacewalk later in the film, but... that's really about it.
Isn't this strange, though? We haven't heard anything from Earth in a few weeks, now. It's got to be our comms system acting up, though; surely nothing would have caused the whole planet to go radio-silent! And not just that, there was supposed to be a colony ship that launched a week ago, where's that? So we'll just... keep trying to reboot things and check and recheck every part of the system to get it all back in order. OK then.
Now, just to be clear: The clear explanation here is that the Aether hasn't heard about the disaster back at home. We saw early on that the ISS has been evacuated, presumably so the crew members could go home to their families? Surely they would have, oh, I don't know, set up a message on repeat that the Aether could pick up? I mean, it's not like there's anything in the way of a message getting from the ISS to some other point on the same side of the solar system's disc; the moon wouldn't be consistently in the way for three weeks, and the ISS orbits about once every 100 minutes or so, so even when the Earth is in the way, that's only going to last about 50 minutes, tops, and then there's a clear shot again. Are we supposed to believe that nobody thought that a ship that has crew members awake rather than in cryostasis might need to know that the planet is suddenly dying and maybe it's a good idea to turn around once you get here?
Just about the point where they're starting to wonder if maybe the problem actually isn't at their end, the ship's alert system goes off. We're suddenly off-course! Nobody fired thrusters, but we're just randomly going a new direction! And we don't know by how much! We can't talk to Earth, so there's no beacons to read (?) and we have to figure out our direction by pinging off of the satellite we left back at Jupiter, so... <sigh> Come on, really? That's not how space works. The crew is going to notice if something changes the ship's direction, for the same reason that you can tell when a car changes direction if you're sitting in the back seat and have your eyes shut. A sudden change in direction is noticeable because inertia; a slow change in direction when you're on the long coast from Jupiter to Earth is... going to make you be way off course *way* sooner than the last week of the trip.
This isn't a short trip, by any stretch of the imagination. It took a boatload of propellant to get the New Horizons probe onto a course to reach Jupiter after 13 months from launch, and Juno took four and a half years to get there and get into orbit, with a gravity assist slingshot off of Earth (yeah, I know how that sounds) two years into the trip; while the Aether was almost certainly constructed in space and therefore didn't need the massive initial launch that would be necessary to get something that big out of Earth's atmosphere, there's also no way it was carrying enough propellant to get that kind of speeds out of Jupiter's orbit without doing some fairly complex orbital maneuvers of its own. Let's keep in mind, also, that our fastest missions to Mars are typically six-month journeys, and that's with perfect planetary alignment for the trip. Space is big.
OK, so we do some technobabble and figure out how to get back on course, but oh no, we have to pass through uncharted space to do it. There could be anything out there and we'd have no clue!
Note: Space is very not crowded. Even the asteroid belt doesn't look like that scene in The Empire Strikes Back. Meteor showers are things we know are coming ahead of time, and those are dust that was left behind by a comet at some point, not big things clustered together. And besides, big things clustered together aren't going to tend to... you know what? I'm not going to get too deeply into this stuff, or this is going to end up a much longer piece than it already was. Suffice it to say, the fact that the uncharted space that's somehow close to Earth and yet hasn't been thoroughly investigated to make sure there's nothing that's potentially catastrophic to life on Earth has not one but *two* clusters of space debris for our poor ship to crash through... What the heck.
Anyways. The first space debris event results in the radar being knocked out and the radio dish being knocked clean off its mount. Right when we were getting to have our long-awaited phone call with Augustine, too! But that's OK, we have a 3D printer on board that we can use to rapidly make a replacement dish! We'll just bash that together in a super short period of time (though we'll say in-dialogue that it's going to take a long time) and go on a spacewalk to fix it!
Now, there's some things I liked about the spacewalk. For one, the outside of the Aether has lots of bars and scaffolds to hook a line to, similar to what rock climbers do. No repeats of Frank Poole's fate in 2001: A Space Odyssey here. These folks are safely attached to the ship, so they won't drift off. Good ship design, OSHA would approve. That said, the walk was way too long of a scene. It just kind of kept going and going and going and you knew something was going to go wrong but it just kept going and... oh hey, the radar's back on and oh no we're hitting another debris storm right now!
To their credit, the filmmakers didn't have someone get their safety line severed so they floated off into space. No, we have... somehow, in defiance of how physics works, one of our three spacewalking crew members, without noticing it happened, gets punctured by something in the storm, and doesn't realize it until she sees drops of blood floating in her helmet. Which... uh... what? If your space suit gets punctured, you notice. Like, immediately. There is a vacuum outside the suit, there's pressure inside it, that pressure wants to get out. You're not going to have your suit slowly fill with blood as we hurriedly rush you into the airlock where we watch helplessly as it's repressurized before we can take off your helmet and have some kind of neat zero-g liquid effects as well over a quart of blood float-pours out of the suit collar and...
What. The. Hell.
So, we have the first character who actually had a significant role in the film die. Poor Maya, a shame we barely got to know her at all beyond that she's got a sister, "Einstein, the smartest cat in the world", and apparently had never heard "Sweet Caroline" before the whole crew has an impromptu karaoke session during her first (and last) ever spacewalk.
Seriously, that's basically all we know about Maya. The Aether crew is painted in such broad, imprecise strokes that we know pretty much nothing about any of them. Well, except Sully, but we don't know that much about her as a character, either. She's... well. She's the whole reason that Augustine is so focused on getting a message out to the ship.
See, Augustine really is the most important character in this movie. What we learn through the flashbacks is that he was the one who discovered the life-sustaining moon around Jupiter, and that he had a poor relationship with a woman when he was younger, and fathered a child but never really got to know the girl.
So, anyways. Radio's fixed, and we can call home and see that it's a wreck, thanks to a satellite that's still working and has a camera pointed the right direction. Welp. That happened. Oh, and we got a call from home, and the wife of one of the crew members is going off to find somewhere to hide from the disaster and his kids are sick and... basically, everything went horribly wrong on Earth for the families. But it takes two to pilot the escape craft, so another crew member's going to take Maya's body with them because he had a daughter who died young and would have been Maya's age (seriously, that's the logic given) and those three are gonna go down to the surface, never mind that, y'know, they're going to all die horribly and leave two crew members behind... You know what, we're at the point of this where it's hard to feel for any of these characters who aren't the old white guy.
Speaking of whom, let's go to that all-important phone call. You know, the one we've been trying to make all movie? Because Aether is about to do its gravity-assist to go back to Jupiter again, and they're going to go through an ionized region of space (is this supposed to be the Van Allen belts or something?) so radio's going to go out. But oh, since Augustine's this guy that she's always wanted to meet because he discovered the magic moon, Sully wants to talk to him a little, anyways. Besides, this is the last time she'll ever hear from anyone who isn't the father of her child or the child herself, so let's go onto a first-name basis, hmm? "Call me Iris."
And the shoe drops. See, the Iris that Augustine has had with him all story long, who's been the impetus for him to make this journey to call Aether and warn them not to land, the seven-year-old girl whose only spoken line is during a dream sequence, is a figment of his imagination. Or his subconscious. Or something. The only time he ever saw her was when she was seven, after all, and he never heard her voice. So of course she's seven and has no voice.
I mean, he's also seen her in anything related to Aether's mission, but let's ignore that. That's not the Iris lodged in his psyche that he utterly failed to have a relationship with. That one's this little girl who has urged him along, silently, and who's...
<sigh>
OK, you know what? The movie's kind of hamfisted in a lot of ways. It knows what it's trying to do, but didn't do the research and the writer didn't really have the writing chops. It's a deeply flawed film, carried almost entirely by the performances of Clooney and Springall, and being massively watched largely because Netflix shoves everything they've got as their Originals in our faces whenever we log in. It's #3 on there today, but it was #1 a few days ago, because the suits at Netflix wanted to generate viewership so they pointed everyone at it.
I loved the design work, at the very least. The various infographics are great, I love that the Aether design looked like they probably 3D-printed the thing in orbit, and I really appreciated that they used 'near future' as an excuse to, without actually explaining what the material was, have the outer skin of the ship be able to dent and rebound so that the debris storms didn't cause explosive decompression of the entire ship. I loved that the ship had plants on it, presumably as a way to minimize how much work needed to be done by powered CO2 converters or something. The holodeck-like room with panels that slide in and out to serve as tables or steps or whatever was really neat, and the rotating habitable area in the ship with the bridge at one end of a dog-bone-shaped apparatus and living area at the other, and a ladder in the middle that could just be floated along because it went through the hub, but also giving them gravity... that was neat, an interesting update of the classic "wheel in space" station design, though I still think I'd have rather seen an actual wheel. It just seems harder to inadvertently knock things off-balance if you have more than two supports total, you know?
And above all, even if there's a lot that wasn't ever satisfactorily explained or was poorly signposted, I really appreciated that there was a minimum of exposition. These characters know what's going on, for the most part, they don't need to explain it to each other in general, so they don't. The film assumes you're able to follow what's going on, technobabble or not, and glean the meanings from what's on screen.
A last thought: Iris is an interesting character. Young Iris, I mean, not Sully. Sully is a plot device. Young Iris, though... You know something's off about her, early on. I mean, I was looking at her and my initial thought, upon seeing the weird way she was acting, was somewhere between 'She seems autistic, maybe that's why she's not talking,' and 'She's an alien from our Jupiter moon, she doesn't speak because she doesn't know the language.' I'd given up on both of those by the time Augustine was deciding to make the trek north, and instead just wanted to go along for the ride. Especially with the getting lost in a blizzard sequence, where she just magically shows up to give Augustine the drive to go on and make it, where he thinks he's lost her and then oh, no, here she is again, she found him... Once the shoe drops, it makes a lot of sense. She's his drive to save his actual daughter, even though, uh... she never finds out that he's her father. He just never brings it up during the phone call. Probably better that way, though. She doesn't have to go through immediately losing her father after finding out he, y'know... exists.
So yeah. Curate's egg. Probably needed to be shorter, or if it was going to be as long as it was they could have fleshed out the Aether crew members a bit more. Pretty to look at, though.