In the distant future, aliens have come down to earth cause for some reason their mother planet is no longer habitable. That is a storyline that belongs to District 9, not the first page of The Silent Planet, a movie by Jeffrey St. Jules which is receiving its World Premiere at Fantasia. While that is the set up for the film, it’s not what it’s about.
Man has advanced to space travel and travel so far away in the universe they live on a habitable and deserted planet known as a penal colony for individuals who commit crimes such as murder, terrorism or treason and are subjected to hard labour, which is essentially punishment. And then this is where we meet Theodore played by veteran character actor Elias Koteas Zodiac Crash The Thin Red Line. He is elderly, sickly and possibly even deranged after being in isolation for an extended period of time.
Theodore mines for glowing ore and assembles it into beams that are sent off the planet. If he does not continue working he is zapped mercilessly by the violet collar with short bursts of current and as if in answer a voice tells him to go back to working.
In the evening, he engages with the AI creative mode and watches as the TV builds up a show by using the concepts presented to it by the viewers. Theodore as well, his story includes a wed couple whose names are the same as his and his ex-wife’s. It is a drag, but things get better with the nightfall when the purple clouds that spray out strange inarticulate voices, come up, and make Theodore engage in some sort of creative, or rather not creative, self-assessment.
Disoriented after the situation and after a brief panic, Theodore, pulls out the foreign object implanted in his body which is a tracking chip, to the extent of making his unseen jailers think he is dead. It is a routine that they have to do each time a convict is pronounced dead at the colony, they get another convict. Niyya played by Briana Middleton, is the one sent this time after being framed to treason. Since The she was brought up by an Oiaen family, an alien that migrated on earth only to be fostered by humans after the alien family was slaughtered by the military.
Theodore, who now feels like there finally is somebody who can listen to him talks, discovers that Niyya had so much disgust for the ‘animals’ that are the humans, that she avoided the man.
Once Theo begins warming to living as a man called Nathan Flannagan, Niyya rings a notion that perhaps she has been placed on this particular colony for extra reasons. This is because Flannagan was the man who shot her family. It is at this point that we get a cat and mouse game. The two prisoners try to determine what is fiction and what for them is just imaginary voices.
This film “The Silent Planet” may appear to be a two bogus, two-hander, but lies in the rural Newfoundland that offers beautiful Val De Loire for the prisoners. Such scenes were shot at Gros Morne National Park, a beautiful plains and hills and mountains as well as high maintenance. When it’s dark, the mountains do not stop rocking plumes of stones sounds in motion. The now inhospitable planet is smaller, so movement in attempted to inhale as much oxygen and there is outside the housing pods and this requires a breathing mask.
The Silent Planet follows the rules develops in other SciFi and Fantasy movies from the start, There is certainly a seed of Theodore and Niyya’s tale in that, only with certain psychic shades of what Sam has to endure in Moon. And also how a young girl shifts to a new and completely different scenario with the boy contending to yet to recover with Severe, which she studied in The Lighthouse. The Silent Planet borrows from its sources and adds a consumable twist to it.
Theodore isation is the first person point cosmos is his centre and then the swelling of Niyya’s assumptions becomes degrading, so do the fans.
Does he live the life he professes to live, or is he merely being disassociated with his traumatic events and creating this specific identity that allows some degree of sanity? Jeffrey St. Jules has given us a deeply molten slow burn thriller that if you may feel in some characters – is the trouble of whom you should support at any point in time along the story.
Koteas as he always does delivers an impressive performance. A melancholic side of him is revealed in that h He pleads, as well as himself, and to get over and to move forward, while at the same time, wants to avoid being burdened by the past. In his current position, experience naturally becomes embedded in wrinkles, as it is with all great veteran actors. Middleton provides a nice balance to him, since she is cool and quite pessimistic from the very start of the film.
This is similar to watching two people trying to work out a way to coordinate their activities on the same planet in a pleasantly civilized way together, without any of them wanting to and trying to engage the opponent and rather wants to use all tiles and pieces for themselves. However, at some point, the situation will escalate, and as in chess, there is only room for one champion.
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