Disaster leaves a public
spacecraft adrift and its social order on the brink of breakdown in this cleverly pertinent sci-fi chiller
With Aniara, the Swedish writing-directing team Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja deliver a cold, cruel, piercingly humane sci-fi parable that’s both bang on the zeitgeist and yet also unnervingly original.
In a near-ish future, the Earth seems to have been made effectively uninhabitable and everyone is moving to Mars. A massive spacecraft, as plushly appointed as any modern-day cruise ship with its buffet bars and play areas, sets off on the three-week voyage to the red planet. MR (Emelie Jonsson), a cheerful low-ranking shipmate, tries to entice passengers to experience the wonders of Mima, an artificially intelligent computer-projection-system-gizmo that taps into people’s memories in order to create an immersive, virtual-reality experience unique to each individual. It’s like the Holodeck in Star Trek, but controlled by a not entirely benign consciousness, akin to the sentient planet in Solaris or maybe Hal in 2001: A Space Odyssey.