EDIT: After some thought, it struck me that the 'Let's Play' format really wasn't something that I was finding to be terribly interesting to follow through with, and what little readership I have wasn't particularly interested, either. I'm leaving this post up because it's at least on literary topics, but I won't be keeping that format any longer. When I'm done with The Longing, I'll do a wrap-up post instead.
That was what drove me to pick this up, initially. I saw the telltale 'Vintage Penguin' spine on the shelf at St. Vincent de Paul, on a book title and author I hadn't heard of, and reached up to take it in hand, give it a closer look, and see what I had found. I had initially thought it was an actual vintage edition, though this quickly changed once I had it in hand; I probably should have known better, as the actual vintage Penguins often have spines that appear upside-down to a modern English-language sensibility (not to mention that the actual vintage edition of this particular book was a green cover Penguin). In any case, my interest was further piqued by the short paragraph on the back cover telling me it's tales of a gentleman thief, and the book's dedication reading "TO A.C.D. THIS FORM OF FLATTERY". Needless to say, that set of initials in a work of late-Victorian-era crime fiction gets my attention, so I was happy to see what Raffles: The Amateur Cracksman had to offer me.
One of the things I really enjoy about classic books being published by Penguin is that they usually include some amount of context for the reader, whether in the form of an appendix full of notes to help with cultural things that may not be clear to modern audiences (in this case, the most obvious case where I needed this was when reference to "fagging" showed up very quickly in the first story, due to the title character and the Watson-style narrator having been at school together), or an introduction that gives a sense of the context in which the work was introduced or simply a bit of a bio of the author. In this particular book, that introduction was somewhat mind-blowing simply in the way that it gives a bit of background not only on Hornung, but even on Arthur Conan Doyle; Hornung was married to Doyle's sister, and was apparently spurred to write these stories, upon suggesting the gentleman-thief idea, at Doyle's insistence. Indeed, this seems to be one of the first examples, if not the first, of the the gentleman-thief trope in fiction. But it goes further; at the end of this book, the titular Raffles purposefully goes over the railing of a ship, many miles from shore, and it's not entirely clear if he has survived (this intended as a way to end the series of stories, similarly to Sherlock Holmes going over Reichenbach Falls). Due to the popularity of the stories, Hornung was convinced to come back and write more, revealing that Raffles had indeed escaped intact; Doyle himself later made use of this same device in bringing Holmes back in later years.
There's a common view that, because of the relationship between Doyle and Hornung and the nature of these stories focusing on the criminal rather than the sleuth, these are somehow an "inversion" of Holmes. That seems a bit of a misinterpretation of what is at work here; an inversion of Sherlock Holmes must, by necessity, be a character in the shape of Dr. James Moriarty, the sort of character who wields the same powers as Holmes but uses them for criminal gain and the material enrichment of themselves, rather than enjoying simply solving the puzzle for the greater good, as Holmes himself does. This does not describe A.J. Raffles, at all.
So, what is it that this thin paperback actually contains, then? Unlike most instances of the gentleman-thief archetype, A.J. Raffles is in it for profit, not for the fun of it. While the character clearly enjoys the game, as it were, and claims he's but an amateur, he engages in his cracksmanship as much for a way of making his living as for the challenge and rush of the crime itself. He has no apparent job outside of simply living the appearance of a proper upper-class gentleman; all of his income seems to come from either gambling (he's introduced at the end of a poor night of Baccarat for the narrator, Harry "Bunny" Manders) or his heists. This book, the first of an eventual four dealing with Raffles and Bunny, contains nine stories, each detailing a criminal escapade. Most of these are, as could be expected of a gentleman-thief, heists, though not all successful. The stories are perhaps less stand-alone than might be expected of a collection like this, where most of them were previously printed in magazines; there are numerous callbacks to prior stories as you go through, with one of the stories even being a direct sequel to an earlier one.
Raffles isn't exactly a likeable character. Admittedly, we're seeing him through Bunny's eyes, and Bunny has known him long enough that many of Raffles's less endearing traits are coming across in his view as 'Oh, that's just what he's like.' There's a repeated plot beat of Raffles assuming that some machination of his or another as part of the heist they're involved in is just going to be obvious to Bunny, then getting huffy about it when Bunny doesn't understand what he's supposed to have done. This comes across as rather less charming than "Elementary, my dear Watson" does; one would expect that when a heist requires two people working to pull it off, both people should necessarily be on the same page.
That said, I did enjoy the stories here, and definitely want to get my hands on the other three books. Hornung was clearly having some fun with the concept, and did his research; apparently, some of the tactics that Raffles makes use of (particularly his way of getting through windows) actually saw a rise in their usage by real-life burglars after the stories were published. Many of the characters and storylines also based largely on real people and events; a recurring police-detective character, Mackenzie of Scotland Yard, is directly inspired by Melville Macnaghten. I do find myself wondering where the further books might go, however; unlike the case of Holmes, where his return would be a surprise but wouldn't likely have any significant dangers for the sleuth, Raffles goes over the railing because Mackenzie has caught him in the act and has warrants based on two other heists as well, so his return from the apparently-dead wouldn't be a case where he could keep his old identity. That in itself suggests that the further books might have some interesting twists; if A.J. Raffles can't be A.J. Raffles, what can he do to maintain the 'gentleman' side of gentleman thief?
...well, that was certainly an unexpected ending.
So, I watched Netflix's adaptation (for lack of a better term) of The Haunting of Hill House back in October/November. Enjoyed it a lot, thought some of the directing decisions were brilliant, but also knew pretty quickly that it was going way off-script. Years and years ago I remember having seen the 1990s film version, and thinking it was... less than great... but not really having a way of articulating why. However, it was pretty clearly a haunted house movie. The Netflix version spends very little time with the adult characters in the titular house, which is a big change from the previous plot. Now, though, having read the book, I think I can explain what's so wrong with the 1999 version, and the trailer I linked there does a very good job of spelling it out exactly.
"There once was a house. A bright happy home. Something bad happened. Now it sits all alone."
Yeaaaaaah, no. Hill House is not at all supposed to be a happy home. Or have a villainous scientist doctor going on, or crazy Winchester House-like bricked-up doors, or... any of the weird stuff that you see in that trailer. But then, that's what you get with a 1990s action film director doing a haunted house thriller, right?
Let's instead look at what Shirley Jackson had to say about the house, hmm? A passage that she not only starts the book with, but also ends with.
No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some, to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.
That does not sound like a bright happy home, to me. And indeed, the house seems, by the descriptions given in the book, to have been purposefully designed to be unsettling to those inhabiting it.
The first thing that's really worth noting, though, is that at no time do we actually see a ghost in the text of the book. Suspenseful scares, sure, but never anything visible. Instead, it's a series of ways that the house is just subtly deranged. Now, that may be anthropomorphizing, to suggest that the house itself suffers some mental instability, but... well, Mrs. Jackson helpfully established that in the second sentence of the book, and the house itself is almost as much a character as any of the leads.
Our primary protagonist in the book, and presumably the 1960s film version (the only one of the three adaptations I haven't yet seen; I wanted to read the book first, as it's apparently also the only one of the three that actually follows the book at all), is Eleanor Vance. Those who have seen the Netflix version may know Eleanor, Nell, as the youngest of the Crain children, who was the most affected by the strangeness of the house, and who spends most of the series, well... dead. Other than the first two chapters (about six pages which serve to give some general background for the characters as a whole, and set up why they all find themselves together in Hill House) and the last chapter (half a page giving a very trim epilogue of 'Here's what happened after all that just went down,' we spend the entire book in Eleanor's head. Very much so, in fact; every little flight of fancy that her mind wanders down is spelled out for us. She lives a very active fantasy life, perhaps understandable as she has spent her entire adult life, up until three months prior to the events of the novel, taking care of her invalid mother, who was apparently equal parts needy and abusive; she now lives on a cot at her sister's house, generally aimless, unemployed, and seemingly still subject to a certain amount of verbal abuse.
Eleanor is joined in our insane manor by Theodora (just Theodora), an artist with a generally lackadaisical view of cultural norms or even generally planning ahead; Luke Sanderson, a character somewhat in the vein of Shakespeare's Prince Hal in that he's got all the advantages being in a rich family brings, but somehow manages to be a bit of a roguish sort nonetheless, and who stands to eventually inherit Hill House; and the three have been brought together by the invitation of Dr. John Montague, a psychologist by training who is trying to bring some scientific credibility to the study of the supernatural, primarily through a method of 'Get some people who have been even tentatively associated in the past with some kind of paranormal occurrence into the house, and have everyone take notes while we stay here for the summer.'
Note: Luke is there because the family that owns Hill House wants a member of the family there; Theo is apparently clairvoyant or something but it's never actually something that plays into the narrative; and Eleanor's house was apparently bombarded with rocks for three days when she was a child, for no apparent reason, though she believes it to have been a prank perpetrated by the neighbors.
Eleanor is a likeable character, though shows signs early on of having a rather less than firm grasp on right and wrong, or even adult life. In order to participate in Dr. Montague's research, she has to steal her sister's car (telling herself that it's OK because "it's half hers," but also not bothering to actually tell anyone where she's going), and consistently lies to everyone she meets once she's started her drive down the road about who she is and what she has waiting for her back at home. It's only in the final pages of the book that anyone finds out the truth about her life, and by then... well, the house has done its damage.
It's very well established from the early pages that, in the small nearby community of Hillsdale, everyone knows precisely what the house is, and knows to stay away from it. We only see the little community long enough for Eleanor to stop in, buy a cup of coffee, and have a very brief exchange asking about how often they get visitors (never). The groundskeeper at the gate to the house is surly, wary of letting anyone in, and once she talks her way past the gate and gets up the driveway, her first impression of the house itself is, well...
The house was vile. She shivered and thought, the words coming freely into her mind, Hill House is vile, it is diseased; get away from here at once.
If only she had listened... well, then the novel wouldn't have happened at all, but such is the way of things; many horror and suspense novels wouldn't happen if the characters listened to their gut.
What we come to find out is that the house was designed by Hugh Crain as a sort of... experiment, almost, in making things purposefully unsettling. There are no right angles in the house; everything is off by just fractions of a degree, perhaps one or two at most. The end result ends up being that doors like to shut themselves if not propped open, rooms feel just a little bit off, and it's easy to think that the house is differently shaped than it actually is by looking out a window. This isn't helped by a floor layout in which there are a great many rooms with no windows to the outside, halls that seem to go just a little too far, a kitchen with three doors out onto the veranda... But not any secret passages or completely hidden rooms, we're assured.
The house is relatively benign by day. Mrs. Dudley, who takes care of the house and cooks for the guests, is very curt, not talkative at all, and very open about how she does not stay there after dark, under any circumstances. In fact, it's stated early on that leaving the house at night is a poor idea; there's a history of people not actually making it down the driveway if they attempt it.
The first part of the novel, then, is taken up with the characters getting to know each other, exploring the house, and Eleanor forming a close friendship with Theo. This becomes a sort of safety mechanism for Eleanor, particularly after the strange events begin at night. Banging on doors, doorknobs jiggling, and so on, with sounds coming from too high up on the door for any of the people present to make them. You know, haunted house stuff.
This starts to change, however, after the house starts directly going after Eleanor. Or maybe not. It's hard to say what's really going on. The first directed occurence is a chalked message along the length of an entire hallway, HELP ELEANOR COME HOME. Whispered voices, seemingly only heard by Eleanor. A scene where Theo's room is vandalized with what seems to all those present to have been blood, the message HELP ELEANOR COME HOME ELEANOR on the wall in the red paint-that-isn't-paint. This particular incident is perhaps the most perplexing in the novel; all four of the primary cast see the way the room has been left, and the room is locked up afterward, to preserve the evidence for Dr. Montague to later sketch for the book he plans to write about all this, but later, when it's opened up again by Dr. Montague's wife, who shows up in the last part of the novel to "helpfully" offer her skills as a medium, everything has been returned to the way it was, as if nothing had happened.
The vandalism in Theo's room drives a wedge between the two women, and Eleanor spends the second half of the book gradually becoming more and more paranoid, convinced that everyone is talking about her when she's not around, that they all know she's a fraud, that none of them are actually her friends at all. This builds to a point where she has a complete psychotic break, in a scene that was very much channeled in the Netflix series during Nell's return to the house, though with a very different endpoint.
The biggest thing that stands out in the novel, really, is that most of the events could, theoretically, be explained on a purely scientific basis. The chalk message could be Luke pranking everyone (though he denies it). The banging on doors could be the house settling. The shadows and unsettling feeling, well, that's explained by the unsettling architecture of the house itself. Eleanor becoming convinced that she belongs in Hill House, that it's her home now and she won't leave, she's going to stay here forever... she's got a less than coherent grasp of reality, as it were.
Theo's room, though, remains the biggest question. What really happened there, and how did it get returned to the way it was? The characters establish early on a rule that nobody should go anywhere alone, and indeed, until Eleanor's breakdown, nobody goes anywhere on their own.
All the same, there is never any indication that there's a real ghost in Hill House. Mrs. Montague may argue that her planchette told her there's a nun bricked up in the walls, or a defrocked monk, but nobody pays her claims any credence. Rather, the implication given by the text is that it is the house itself that is doing the haunting. A mass hallucination seems somewhat unlikely, given the detail of the episode in Theo's room, but seems the only other potential explanation, short of the house being, well...
not sane.
OK, so the latest hot thing to hit Netflix is The Midnight Sky, George Clooney's post-apocalyptic sci-fi film. Apparently it's a bit of marmite, with viewers either thinking it's a great film or a waste of two hours. I took the couple of hours to watch it tonight, and have some things to say.
So, I having laid that out beforehand: I did enjoy this film. That said, it's certainly a curate's egg. The rest of this piece is going to be somewhat critical and a little snarky, and I'll preface it with a warning: if you want to go into this film with any ability to watch and not know what's coming, stop right here, because we're headed into spoiler-land. I really don't think it's possible to discuss this film without doing so; there's enough tied up in some reveals in the last few minutes of the film that it's kind of unavoidable. If you want to go watch it first, and see which side of the Love It/Hate It divide you fall on, I'll wait.
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.