Noah Hawley’s intriguing film, based on a true story, is about the effects on those who go to space of coming back to Earth’s quotidian reality
Astronaut movies about the “classic” era, such as Ron Howard’s Apollo 13 or Damien Chazelle’s First Man, have men in buzzcuts doing the heroism up above while the womenfolk are relegated to gathering anxiously around TV sets back on Earth. More contemporary stories, such as Alfonso Cuarón’s Gravity, give women a more active role – and in its ironic and offbeat way, this new movie is another such. It comes from Noah Hawley, the much-admired showrunner of the TV shows Fargo and Legion, now making his feature directing debut. He has worked with screenwriters Brian C Brown and Elliott Di Giuseppi on this fictional version of one of the strangest tales in Nasa history: a tale of sexual tension in space, and what happens when spacemen and spacewomen have to come to terms with the existential boringness of life back on Earth.
It is a witty, intriguing film in many ways, seductively shot by
British cinematographer Polly Morgan. I suspect Hawley has taken some inspiration from Sam Mendes’s
American Beauty, with its eerie suburban moodscape. But I also feel the film is unsure of how much to disturb its audience, unsure whether to pursue the chaos and embarrassment of a bungled, noir-ish crime and an unsightly psychological disorder, or to contrive something more emollient: to finesse some sympathy and even heroism for the story’s troubled female lead.