Another Earth

What if you looked up in the sky one day and saw a beautiful blue ball that looked exactly like the one on which we live. And then you learned that it is inhabited with doppelgängers of everyone on your Earth. What would think? How would you feel?

This should have been the premise of Another Earth.

The movie introduces us to Rhoda, as played by the lovely Brit Marling. She is on the cusp of adulthood and is looking forward to beginning the next phase of her life at MIT where she will study astrophysics. Rhoda is driving home after a party when it is blared over the radio that a new planet which looks a lot like Earth is newly visible in the sky. She looks out her window to catch a glimpse of the orb. Distracted, she misses a stop sign and her car collides with another that is stopped at the intersection. In this car is John (William Mapother), a music professor and conductor, along with his wife and young son. Rhoda emerges from the wreckage in a daze and discovers that the boy was thrown from the car, through the windshield, and out onto the curb.

Rhoda does her time in jail and, upon release, moves back in with her parents. She finds work as a janitor at a local school. One day she gets the courage to go to John's home and apologize. The problem is that he is in a bad state, letting John Barleycorn wash his blues away. John answers the door in a grumpy state which throws Rhoda off. Instead of apologizing, she says that she's with a cleaning agency and is offering a free trial of their services. Struggling with grief, John's house is surely in need of cleaning. Rhoda does a good job and John hires her to tidy up once a week. Eventually, Rhoda and John develop feelings for one another.

Concomitant to Rhoda's Lady Macbeth routine, that orb in the sky is moving closer. Astronomers have determined that its landmasses are exact copies of those on Earth. In a rather disturbing yet touching scene, a scientist attempts to make radio contact with the planet and discovers that she is talking to her own doppelgänger who recalls memories from their collective past. Rhoda spends some of her free time staring up longingly at the other Earth as it moves closer and looms larger in the sky. She enters a contest to win a flight to the new planet and wins. I won't spoil the ending (not much, anyway) but will say the Rhoda's plan to escape doesn't, well, go exactly as planned.

While Rhoda and John's relationship was endearing, the problem with Another Earth is that it takes a situation (the approach of Earth's clone) with an interesting metaphysical aspect and relegates it to the background where it and its consequences hang around until they're picked when the story requires more metaphor. Rhoda seeks out redemption while John looks to be reborn. Unfortunately this new planet laden with clones of everyone basically provides a metaphor of Rhoda seeking escape and seeking herself but little else. The movie spends too much time showing close-ups of her face. While Marling is a beautiful woman, it got old looking at her visage with its attendant look of despondency fixed upon it. Since Rhoda and John are the only characters who get developed here, I was hoping for a bit more recognition on their parts that, not only was there another Earth above, but also another them. "Wow! That's crazy!" and a few questions were thin gruel for me.

As I said before, I don't want to give away the ending but I will say that I think it suffered because of this. It was nice to see a resolution that didn't resolve anything but its impact was lessened because of the film's refusal to consider the above.

Still, I give the filmmakers tons of credit for making an intelligent exercise in my beloved sci-fi genre instead of a brainless CGI-laden action flick.