LOVE
Angels and Airwaves
William Eubank
Love: Angels and Airwaves is a beautifully shot DIY auteur affair from first-time director William Eubank. The film tackles huge concepts that are probably just a little too big for its boots.
While the appeal of blockbuster sci-fi faded for me long ago, indie sci-fi continues to hold a special place in my heart. It’s a cinematic arena that offers unparalleled freedom for high concept expression.
Last year’s Another Earth used the discovery of a second Earth as the backdrop for an exploration into grief and regret. Love takes its cues from some masterworks of the genre like Solaris and Moon. These films, like their predecessor 2001: A Space Odyssey, explore male-centric loneliness and obedience to authority whilst commenting on our relationship with technology.
These are films that you can turn over in your brain for days, sometimes months. There is a brave ambiguity that permeates through them that, by the time you reach the ending, you feel that you have completed a substantial journey.
Then there is Love. A film that at times seems scripted by pepped-up high school kids to whom the phrase ‘imitation is the sincerest form of flattery’ is a war cry.
The film is actually beautiful to look at: the cinematography and acting are tidy and polished. The music, by emo/pop supergroup Angels and Airwaves – also the film’s producers – is sparse and mostly well used. There is also a great scene that does well to update 2001’s trippy light sequence, but for me all of that beautiful referencing and imagery is sucked out into the black void of space by the time we hit the films ending. Love lacks subtlety and the ability to show, not tell.
I wish the next sentence began something like “despite the dodgy title…” but unfortunately it doesn’t. The film turns out to be all about love. What a generically boring, blandly expansive and overdone subject for film to be about. This is the same reason why I avoid Jennifer Aniston movies.
Let’s not talk about the plot – it’s expansive non-story hyperextends itself into confusion. Instead, I will allude to the film with grandiose sweeping statements and present them in the style of the Love is… strips of the ‘70’s by the late New Zealand cartoonist, Kim Casali.
Love is…
- pretty
- big bloated ideas masquerading as truth
- confusing, but not in a Donny Darko cool kind of way
- something that looks beautiful but in the end leaves you feeling empty and betrayed
- not a fucking sci-fi movie at all
Perhaps the glory days of intelligent sci-fi have passed. Perhaps they have gone the way of 90’s action, or 70’s porn. But I will continue to fall crushingly into any new low budget sci-fi that comes along. What can I say? Love is blind like that.
If you are even remotely as passionate about indie sci-fi as Rob, get behind the Pozible campaign for the new Aussie project Arrowhead.