Commander William Xu, pilot Rosa Dasque, science officer Daniel Luxembourg, marine biology scientist Katya Petrovna, engineer James Corrigan and chief engineer Andrei Blok are six members of Europa One, a spaceship launched to explore Europa, Jupiter's moon. A solar storm causes a short circuit and breaks off communication with Earth. Corrigan goes outside to fix it, but gets hydrazine on his spacesuit and thus isn't allowed back inside as to not contaminate the spaceship, so he drifts out in space and dies. The mission lands on Europa and drills on its ice surface, finding evidence of microbiological life. Katya disappears below the ice. A malfunction crashes their lander back on Europa. The crew dies. The last survivor, Rosa, sends the video recordings back to Earth, showing how a black octopus-like creature attacks from the sea, before the lander falls through the ice.
Independent science-fiction film "Europa Report" embodies several issues with space movies which are often incompatible with the classic three-act structure of character arc. "Europa Report" has some gorgeous scenes of space travel, but is more suitable for astronaut fans than for universal cinema lovers: all its characters are one-dimensional and reduced to only being formal. People more inclined towards space travel and exploration will thus find it more interesting, since some moments of space really are brilliant, for instance the point-of-view of Corrigan in his spacesuit, drifting away from the Europa One spaceship, seen as a distant object in the dark, or the fascinating scene of Katya making ice samples on the surface of Europa, observing Jupiter in the sky, and an especially interesting perspective here is that her face is only shown from a close-up of her eyes while she is in her spacesuit. Equipped with amazing visual effects, and crafted as some sort of "found footage" film depicting from video recordings of the space mission, "Europa Report" disappoints a bit in the bizarre ending which feels unexplored and too abrupt, in a strange and unearned plot twist, and is overall too sterile, cold and grey to engage on a higher level. Yes, astronauts are supposed to stay focused on their mission and "turn off" their emotions and private neurorses or problems, but a film needs to show more color, versatility and ingenuity, since in this edition it does tend to exhaust the viewers' goodwill in the last third.
Grade:++
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