Meanwhile on Earth
Meanwhile on Earth
It is a dismal tale in the faux genre turning Futuristic that is the debut feature film, meanwhile on earth written and directed by Jérémy Clapin. The past is full of such ambitious ideas which have now become naive and dulled fantasies while the same cannot be said of the present as it is only a relentless attitude of degradation. Clapin’s film, the follow-up to I Lost My Body, is tinted in winter colors of bleakness, as almost all of its frames are saturated with a generic post-Futurism mood. There are anyway fits of understanding more commonplace grief, the one regarding the abandonment of those ideals that became present but not without an effort or sacrifice.
This film is about Elsa (Megan Northam) who is a young woman with his brother, Franck (voiced bySebastian Pouderoux), as an astronaut, vanished out into the dark void of space. Nonetheless, whenever Franck and Elsa meet while she daydreams in Meanwhile on Earth there is particularly a lot of corporate culture which returns the attention of the reader to the comic’s exploration phase concepts. Her condition works at a hospice to make ends meet and that was supposed to be for a short period until she learns to cope with her sadness.
It was a stormy evening and Elsa could hear her brother’s faint voice coming from an antenna. Franck communicates to her that he is in hostage of an alien “they” that can revive him if she offers assistance. He tells his sibling to put in a shining pod in her ears so that he can talk to her more properly. After a brief talk, Franck is abducted by an alien parasite (Dimitri Doré). An entity informs that if Elsa follows a certain course, she will get her brother back.
This option is seen as a variation of the trolley problem. Elsas Contradicts With Trolley Problem Where the philosopher in this case asks whether we would consider one death for the sake of many for Elsa decides if she must kill seven to save her brother. Each of the victims will be the host of one of the seven undying beings who comprise the ‘they’. Elsa accepts such proposal after handing over ‘their’ first host pretty accidently while saving herself from sexual assault. First her weepie tryouts to choose the reactors which she thinks of have nothing. There’s the example of a patient of the facility with advanced dementia and a homeless alcoholic. If the thought-experiment-made-real doesn’t feel quite enough of a shoehorned plot device, it comes with a time limit, to help create suspense.
Meanwhile on Earth employs this facility to demonstrate how the self-absorption of grief and depression can become directed to harm others and how the colonized can assist the colonizer. When Elsa resolves that the fifth victim will be the only one to escape, a question that seemed to loom in the film – whether a family member’s life is more precious than that of a downed stranger – is answered: in the negative; even if that downed stranger was not so abstract anymore because he had shared with her his lifelong dream of starting a restaurant.
That’s interesting enough, but the conclusion of the film leaves you disappointed and some angered. As Elsa emerges from a tunnel into bright sunshine and later on the beach, Clapin implies she has successfully over come her depression. Somewhere in the distance, I want to say a ship or a spaceship is hardly visible. All well and good, save that she has or is in some cases responsible for (at least) the deaths of four people, and only graves have had defenses with the rest being execution policies. The very dire moral and psychological repercussions of her taking that bargain and not living up to that bargain are quite obviously out of the film’s range.
In order to explain Elsa’s extremely sudden recovery one can make several attempts to offer one or another interpretation but the majority of them will be based on overlooking quite a lot of events that take place on screen. In the meantime she imagines that “Meanwhile on Earth” tracks so closely onto Elsa’s subjectivity that it has to be imagined perhaps, acted out in her sketchbook safe or is but a delusional episode. But if there was no blood on Elsa’s hands and it was all purely ‘just a dream’, then perhaps there isn’t a need for a world that requires any kind of actions from her character within it, because there are no such actions nor a character either.
Unless of course the film is an extended metaphor for the so called bargaining stage of grieving wherein therefore, at best, seeks to mourn the loss of a better outcome. If it is the case, that hardly rescues the admittedly wretched narrative of Meanwhile on Earth from, regretfully, totalitarianising the very nature of its characters and making them retract from the tangible atmosphere, the art of the film, ‘shadows of power’ and pondering.
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- Genre: Adventure, Drama, Sci-fic
- Country: United States
- Director: Jérémy Clapin
- Cast: Megan Northam, Dimitri Doré, Sébastien Pouderoux, Catherine Salée, Sam Louwyck, Roman Williams, Sofia Lesaffre