Love (2011)
What a weird mixed bag of a movie. With a zinger of a misleading title.
Yes, okay, this ultimately is about what a man abandoned in the space station starts to think about--not sex (according to the movie) but love, some idealized love with a hot babe on a Malibu beach.
And oh yeah, this guy has dreams--or some kind of astral travel memories--of fighting heroically in the Civil War, surround by buff guys being equally heroic and doomed. Gradually the mental state of the one main character shifts and becomes unreliable, and dreams and daydreams become hallucinations, or perhaps some kind of actual revelation of another existence, and it gets surreal.
So the big picture is this is an overly simple movie with a couple well-worn ideas worn further and sometimes to the point of actually boredom. On that level, don't see it.
But, as is typical these days (in a good way), there are some visual and technical moments here that are amazing. Really amazing.
The first of these is a series of scenes of Civil War battles with really complex, layered, smoky, dusty clashes of men and bodies--in delicious slow motion. There's no point to these moments except the drama, but the drama is self-sufficient. They echo the best epic paintings of war of any kind.
And there are other moments with drawings that become moving pictures (again of the Civil War), and some general photography of that past era that works well. Plus the station itself is reasonably interesting, if a little awkwardly uncomfortable (compared to pictures I've seen of the real thing).
Which brings us to the final problem--there is no weightlessness. Almost the entire movie is this single man in an empty space station around Earth, and there would be zero gravity. Not a hint.
What should anyone make of all the derivative stuff here, mainly borrowing (appropriating, stealing?) from the fabulous "2001" and possibly the not-fabulous "Marooned," both from the late 1960s? I don't know. The ending here is an especially, painfully faint echo of Kubrick's great statement about the loneliness of the universe. And the slight romanticizing of this man's isolation (with his visions of a woman with lots of skin showing) reminds me of Soderbergh's romantic remake of "Solaris."
There are better movies about being lost in space.
