Nocturne for Two Engines
Somewhere past Jupiter, the radio starts answering.
- science fiction
- drama
Gorgeous, chilly hard science fiction that mistakes withholding for depth in its final third.
What works
- The most convincing zero-gravity staging since Gravity
- A genuinely unsettling central idea
- Uses silence better than any blockbuster this year
What falls short
- The last forty minutes withhold rather than resolve
- Two of the four crew never become people
- At 154 minutes it is at least one act too long
Adeyemi's second feature is the rare science fiction film that has actually done the reading. Orbits behave. Radio has latency. When something goes wrong outside the hull, it goes wrong slowly and quietly, and the film understands that this is more frightening than any explosion.
The problem with the third act
For ninety minutes this is close to a great film. Then it arrives at the point where it must decide what its central mystery means, and it declines. Ambiguity is a legitimate choice, but ambiguity has to be built; here it reads as a script that ran out of answers and reframed that as mystery.
Worth seeing on the largest screen you can find, with the caveat that you may leave admiring it more than you enjoyed it.
By the numbers
154
Minutes
4
Crew
18
Months in build
0
Green screen shots
Cast
Amara Osei
Cmdr. Idowu
Tom Bexley
Reyes
Sofia Marchetti
Vogel