Approaching the Unknown

Approaching the Unknown

I bet if you remember “The Martian,” the 2015 sci-fi hit, one of the things you think about is Matt Damon’s cheerful stranded astronaut vowing to survive on Mars: “I’m gonna have to science the sat out of this!” “Approaching the Unknown” is a sci-fi movie about getting to Mars, not being stranded there. It has a much smaller scope than the Ridley Scott-directed big-budget film and a little more silencing the sat out of things action. Its intentions are good, its conscience clear; it knows what it’s doing.

Mark Strong plays Captain William D. Stanaforth, who is making a solo flight to Mars in order to begin colonization. He knows he will not be coming home, but that does not disturb him too much. “Six billion people on Earth cheering me on are also wondering why I do this,” he muses in voiceover. Well, he does it because it is what he does. Like all astronauts, he also happens to be an advanced scientist who has figured out how to make drinking water out of dirt and whose ship contains a reactor that is crucial not just for his journey but also for the job he will do once he lands on the red planet.

Another spaceship follows behind his craft; it is piloted by Sanaa Latham’s Capt. Maddox, who appears considerably less chill than Stanaforth (the view we get of her character through video screens from his craft) and whose temperament as well as technical difficulties provide early on tension for the movie. When not troubleshooting for Maddox from afar, Stanaforth interacts with earthbound colleague and apparent best friend Louis Skinner (a.e.a Luke Wilson), an ever-earnest Mission Control archetype.

“Approaching the Unknown” is written and directed by Mark Elijah Rosenberg; it marks his feature debut. And while having had the ill luck of being a much smaller-budgeted Mars movie that followed a much bigger-budgeted Mars movie, it shows its influences from classics such as “2001: A Space Odyssey” and cult items like “Silent Running”; you don’t get the sense of opportunistic knockoff.

Nevertheless, the movie’s observations about living in space walk familiar terrain. There’s the staving off of loneliness by being spectacularly good at one’s job. There’s the drawing of a line between space age technology and good old analog know-how at a crucial point in the mission (which naturally goes wobbly in all sorts of ultra-challenging ways as it proceeds), Stanaforth pulls out an heirloom wooden toolbox and finds just the right gadget inside to fix a problem with the reactor.

Then things go worse than wobbly; Stanaforth faces having to abort the mission. There is only so much in the technical challenge department that he can survive. The flashbacks in the movie suggest he is a man unburdened by conventional family ties; this makes him something of a natural in the leaving Earth behind for good department. On the other hand his forced stoic disposition which Strong portrays very well, as he has built up quite a solid career playing these types of roles gives him tunnel vision that is slightly chilling.

While contemplating never setting foot on Mars, Stanaforth says, “I wanna be ripped apart by space.” From here on in visually at least allusions to “2001: A Space Odyssey” become increasingly hard to deny. But “Approaching the Unknown” doesn’t ultimately make the “ultimate trip” turn that Kubrick’s film did. It remains cool, competent, compelling within a narrow range yet its unknown never expands into something extraordinary.

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