Mike Cahill
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Connections, in both directions
The movie is as thought-provoking, in a less profound way, than Tarkovsky's "Solaris," another film about a sort of parallel Earth.
One of the most poignant moments in Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris comes when the cosmonaut Snaut remarks that, “We don't want any more worlds, only a mirror to see our own.”
There are no little green men and no special effects to speak of, but the looming presence of that planet and its possibilities turns Another Earth into a metaphysical treat, with influences that range from Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique and Blue to Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.
First-time director Mike Cahill's "Another Earth" suggests Andrei Tarkovsky's "Solaris" by way of Aaron Katz.
What Movies Will It Remind You Of?: Bliss is kind of a significantly less fighty and shooty The Matrix tossed in a blender with a high-concept WTF boggler like Serenity (2019).
A documentary that explores the belief and slim possibility that we’re living in a “simulation” world, not unlike that imagined in “The Matrix,” and “Bliss,” another film that toys with that idea in fictional-fantasy form, come out at the same time?
Although The Matrix is an obvious inspiration here, Bliss does eventually find its own groove, though Cahill initially struggles to make a story which features a certain amount of necessary detachment and disorientation coherent.
Ultimately, Bliss ’ messages about learning to appreciate what’s right in front of you, as well as facing ugly things about yourself that you’d rather just wish away, are made pretty clear, and it’s a way more intimate story about simulation theory than anything seen in, say, The Matrix .
Isabel is part-superhero out of spandex, part-manic pixie dream girl, part-Morpheus from The Matrix .
The unlikeliest pairing in recent memory, Owen Wilson and Salma Hayek are caught rummaging through a strange alternate reality in “Bliss,” which is basically “The Matrix” but with dumber tech and a Bill Nye cameo.
The third is the discovery by space explorers of another world where we meet our doubles: this is what happens in a mysterious fashion in Kubrick's 2001: A Space Odyssey and Tarkovsky's Solaris and more explicitly in Journey to the Far Side of the Sun (aka Doppelgänger), the 1969 venture into live-action film‑making by the Thunderbirds team.
Rhoda and the audience learn about this "mirror Earth" via the patter of a hip-hop deejay on a car radio; this is a beautiful example of the film's recurring success in conveying important information in believably mundane ways, without the need for science-fiction special effects or sequences with scientists or feds, as one might find in a studio film: I'm thinking in particlar of 1969's "Journey to the Far Side of the Sun," a more traditional if admirably "Twilight Zone"-esque science-fiction film about the discovery of a duplicate Earth.
Shadows of The Twilight Zone and Another Earth hang over this impressively stripped-down, experimental sci-fi about a dinner party that fractures into alternative realities thanks to a mysterious comet.
Not long ago Mike Cahill gave us “Another Earth,” about a mirror planet to our own, and now we have James Ward Byrkit’s “Coherence,” a micro-budget affair that reduces the phenomenon to the neighborhood level.
There's a superficial similarity to Another Earth, in that it deals with parallel existences.
(With her blonde locks, it’s not hard to see her as the equivalent of Brit Marling in a version of Another Earth that actually turns out to be interesting.)
Shane Carruth's cerebral mind-bender Primer and Mike Cahill's lo-fi astrological fable Another Earth are obvious reference points too.
If you’re into indie sci-fi in the vein of “Primer” or “Another Earth,” where the thrills up the spine come from ideas rather than visual effects, get a ticket now to see James Byrkit’s mindbender “Coherence.”
American films like “Audrey Rose” (1977), from a script and before that a novel by Frank De Felitta, tackled reincarnation themes but within the format of extreme melodrama bordering on horror.
The Double Life of Véronique (1991)
Directed by Krzysztof Kieślowski
influenced I Origins (2014), Another Earth (2011)
Themes
This thriller is like a spiritual cousin to Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days” and maybe Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique.”
There are no little green men and no special effects to speak of, but the looming presence of that planet and its possibilities turns Another Earth into a metaphysical treat, with influences that range from Krzysztof Kieslowski's The Double Life of Veronique and Blue to Andrei Tarkovsky's Solaris.
It at least dates back to Ernst Lubitsch’s Broken Lullaby (1932), where the French soldier who killed a German family’s son visits the family and accidentally becomes a second son to them.
Seeking a Friend for the End of the World (2012)
Directed by Lorene Scafaria
influenced by Another Earth (2011)
Plot Themes
While the film’s website helpfully points out the many movies with a similar premise that inspired this story, they also bring to mind so many other recent apocalypses that have approached the familiar set-up with far more creativity and insight into human behavior, let alone entertainment value—Jeff Nichols’s Take Shelter , Brit Marling and Mike Cahill’s Another Earth, or Lars von Trier’s Melancholia .
In Mike Cahill's Another Earth, a carbon copy of our planet approached from points unknown and ended up taking up orbit in the sky, as those on our world discovered that the twin Earth had alternate versions of themselves.
Last year alone brought us Lars von Trier's "Melancholia," Brit Marling's "Another Earth" and such television shows as 'Falling Skies' and 'The Walking Dead' among others.
The end of the world is hardly a rare subject for movies; recently we've had " Melancholia " and " Another Earth ," and who could forget Don McKellar's bittersweet " Last Night " (1998)?
Survivalists are counting the days until the rapture or the Mayan meltdown, and last year we had two separate movies about astronomical annihilation ("Another Earth" and "Melancholia").
This thriller is like a spiritual cousin to Kathryn Bigelow’s “Strange Days” and maybe Krzysztof Kieslowski’s “The Double Life of Veronique.”
“I Was a Teenage Werewolf” (1957) really was a “challenging drama of today’s teenage violence,” but that slogan was reserved for a prestige picture, “Rebel Without a Cause.”
Another Earth’s plot suggests the recent Rabbit Hole (another fatal accident and sympathetic perp), and exploits to ingenious effect physicist Brian Greene's rather thrilling theory of multiple universes.
The buzz: The notion of an unusual relationship between the perpetrator and victim of an accidental tragedy has certainly been done before, most recently in last year’s “Rabbit Hole.”
The simplicity is refreshing, and though the at-times theatrical two-hander structure mines a similar vein of grief exploration as last year's Rabbit Hole , it makes no attempt at mastery over the subject.
The simple story has overtones of the recent Rabbit Hole.
(Think " Reservation Road " and " Rabbit Hole .")
The intimate telling puts "Another Earth" in the tradition of humanistic sci-fi movies like John Carpenter 's "Starman" and John Sayles "Brother From Another Planet."
Way back in 1999, as some moviegoers will recall, M. Night Shyamalan directed "The Sixth Sense," an effective drama with a twist that left a lot of people, including this reviewer, completely off guard.
The heavy-handed vintage rejoinder (see “The Invisible Man,” 1933) lands with a thud.
Even avant-garde auteurs such as Alejandro Jodorowsky ("El Topo," "Jodorowsky's Dune") and Leos Carax ("Holy Motors") have methods for their madness.
It’s a mark of Cahill’s improving command of pace that his first hour feels comparable to David Cronenberg’s ominously romantic remake of The Fly (1986), with a killer turning point involving a massive research breakthrough and a tragedy on the same day as Ian and Sofi’s wedding.
The parallel-universes concept is fine, but the bad-idea-relationship plot feels like it was nicked from “Monster’s Ball.”
It’s a marvel of restraint and perfectly judged for the material that will likely endear itself to audiences that found Upstream Color’s DNA dalliances too kooky as well as those who enjoy the more human-oriented sci-fi of Contact.
“Bliss” is essentially “The Matrix” meets “Vanilla Sky,” just without any of the dazzling action.
In the metaphysical journey that is “Bliss,” there comes a time when one almost expects Agent Smith from “The Matrix” to pop in looking for Mr. Anderson, or perhaps McCabe from “Vanilla Sky” to find our hero on a rooftop and tell him, “Mortality as home entertainment — this cannot be the future, can it?”
The device that rooted the viewer in that stasis-dreaming-man-as-a-battery trilogy helmed by the Wachowskis and those Terry Gilliam films (and “Vanilla Sky” as well) was the reliable point of view from their unreliable protagonists: We saw only what they saw.
The Endless is inventive and imaginative in a low-budget, DIY way – it has some of the do-a-lot-with-a-little spirit of those early Brit Marling independents (multiple moons appear over the compound, recalling the twin planets of Another Earth ).