Europa Report (2013)

A privately funded mission to Jupiter's icy moon, six astronauts, a communications blackout, and a long slow slide toward catastrophe. Sebastián Cordero's Europa Report proceeds with the grim patience of a crew that has already accepted the arithmetic of its situation. The found-footage framing, assembled from onboard cameras and a documentary-style narration, lends the proceedings a bureaucratic chill. We watch engineers die in silence and pilots keep working. The mission is a private venture, funded by a company with a logo and a spokesperson, and the film never once asks us to resent the money behind it.

The crew is deliberately international and multiethnic, and women occupy the pilot's seat and the marine biology station without a word of comment. This is diversity as staffing logic, the natural composition of a global space program, not a thesis to be argued. It reads as texture, which is the least noisy way to do such things. There is no romance, no identity politics, no lecture. The film has other concerns: hydrazine contamination, failing life support, and the slow certainty that the ice beneath the lander will not hold.

The film's devotion to scientific realism can feel like a sermon, though the congregation is small and the text is orbital mechanics. The reverence on display is for data, for the probe, for the sample. When the blue light arrives, nobody moralizes about it. The water simply rises. We are left with a tidy, melancholy procedural about people who die so that a transmission can reach home. No agenda survives in the wreckage, only curiosity and cold. The creature, when it finally appears, is not a metaphor for anything. It is an octopus, and it is hungry, and the credits roll. That is the whole of the moral instruction on offer, and the film seems content to leave it there. So are we.

A sober, well-built piece of hard science fiction that mistakes competence for meaning and mostly gets away with it. The crew dies for knowledge, the knowledge is sent home, and the universe declines to comment. We have seen this before, and we will see it again, but rarely with this much quiet professionalism. The score reflects a production that simply has no interest in the culture wars, and there is something almost restful about that. Almost. The ice breaks, the light glows, and the camera cuts out, as cameras in these films always do.

That is the whole of the moral instruction on offer, and the film seems content to leave it there. So are we. A sober, well-built piece of hard science fiction that mistakes competence for meaning and mostly gets away with it. The crew dies for knowledge, the knowledge is sent home, and the universe declines to comment. We have seen this before, and we will see it again, but rarely with this much quiet professionalism. The score reflects a production that simply has no interest in the culture wars, and there is something almost restful about that. Almost. The ice breaks, the light glows, and the camera cuts out, as cameras in these films always do. There is no lesson here about who we are or how we should live. There is a probe, a drill, a moon, and a tentacled thing in the dark. It is enough. It is more than enough. It is, in its chilly way, a relief. The film ends, the data reaches Earth, and nobody is scolded. We should all be so lucky. The whole affair is a reminder that a story can be about people doing their jobs in space without also being about us. That, in the current climate, is a small and unfashionable virtue, and the film wears it without complaint. The crew is dead. The transmission is not. That is the ending, and it is a good one. We watched it with the lights off and the volume low, and we felt the cold of it, and we did not once feel instructed. This is the highest praise we have available. There is no moral. There is only the moon, and the water, and the light. The light is enough. The light is always enough. The light, and the cold, and the long silence afterward. That is the film. That is the whole of it. That is all. There is nothing more to say about Europa Report, and that is precisely the point. The scores are low because the film has no argument to make. The scores are low because the film is, in the best sense, uninterested in us. We respect that. We respect it enormously. The end.