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Created Nov 14, 2013 09:59PM PST • Edited Aug 29, 2020 04:22PM PST

1. Quality

2. Summary

   Great 4.0

   Whoa, we’ve got ourselves a great new SciFi gem, an instaclassic along the lines of Gravity. It’s imperfect sure, but Europa Report’s mashup of that new benchmark’s workaday realism, Prometheus’s something’s-out-there sensationalism and The Blair Witch Project’s found-footage immediacy makes for a potent brew.

   Europa Report plays straight with Earth sending half a dozen humans on a multiyear mission to Jupiter’s sixth-closest moon. Europa – that moon – may have a subsurface ocean. If it has water, it may have life.

   Europa One’s mission-clock goes out months, years even, then returns to the beginning, after which the movie recounts all of the mission’s spacey thrills. It shows us slices of life from the crew along the way. Europa Report is a benchmark because of its fastidious imagining of that multiyear space flight.

   • Passes many of Jupiter’s moons before showing her overwhelming mass, as pictured nearby.
   • The super moon landing on Europa: talk about a giant leap.
   • Detailed visualizations of the user interfaces, food, comms and quarters. Google Europa Report Images for a sense of how vast and deep the SciFi imaging is. Vast and Deep

   Director Sebastián Cordero employs a Blair Witch twitchiness that gets annoying, especially through multiple screens. He also employs an unoriginal alien plot animator. What kind of life on Europa? Indeed.

   But his high drama is frequent and mostly all effective. Staging a malfunction a minute in the latter half of the film keeps the astronauts’ stilted lives juiced, especially given the fact that they’re each going to die.

   Oops, mission movies where six go out are always about the fact that most of them aren’t coming back.

   Working from Philip Gelatt’s impressive original script (wow), Cordero stages this death march brilliantly, never more than when juxtaposing the last breaths of one astronaut with the rejuvenating breaths of another.

   Between this sleeper and the brilliant smash Gravity, 2013’s been a berry, berry good year for SciFi movies.

4. Acting

   Great 4.0

   Europa One crew

   • Daniel Wu as the Captain
   • Anamaria Marinca as his Copilot
   • Christian Camargo as the Chief Science Officer
   • Karolina Wydra as his hot Science Officer
   • Michael Nyqvist as the Chief Engineer, recognizable from The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo.
   • Sharlto Copley as his talkative associate Engineer. The star of District 9 is arguably the greatest SciFi actor working today.

   Twelve stunt players double up on the Europa One cast. That’s two per actor. Yep, sounds right.

   Europa Ventures

   • Embeth Davidtz as the CEO
   • Dan Fogler as the nerd cheerleader
   • Isiah Whitlock Jr.’s head engineer deploys his mellifluous baritone to soothing effect. Whitlock is an unfailingly pleasant sight to see on screen.

5. Male Stars Great 4.0

6. Female Stars Great 4.0

7. Female Costars Great 4.0

8. Male Costars Great 4.0

10. Film

    Really Great 4.5

    “Compared to the breath of knowledge yet to be known, what does your life actually matter?” isn’t an unusual line for Europa Report, even if it’s unusually profound in the wider world of film. Philip Gelatt’s screenplay is a deep and complete creation, complex yet credible. It’s so good, it’s worth mentioning ahead of the Gravity quality visuals, which are second to none. None.

    Imagine a manned mission to one of Jupiter’s moons. This is that.

    JPL is one of the many Thanks that roll by in the final credits.

    Warning: Europa Report is The Blair Witch Project in space. That’s got pluses and minuses. You’re on your own.

11. Direction Really Great 4.5

    Director Sebastián Cordero explains how he put the science back in science fiction in a DigitalTrends interview.

12. Play Really Great 4.5

13. Music Very Good 3.5

14. Visuals Really Great 4.5

    Lots of set decorators, carpenters, scenic artists, violins, violas, FX animators and so on and so forth.

15. Content

16. Edge

    Risqué 2.0

    Doom suffuses the air.

17. Sex Innocent 1.0

18. Violence Brutal 2.6

19. Rudeness Salty 2.5

21. Reality

    Surreal 2.2

    Circumstantial reality is the most abused in Europa Report, reaching up to a full 3.0, aka Surreal. Physical and Biological reality are each modestly under 2.0, i.e. less than Surreal. Needless to say, such a restrained level of fantasy isn’t how SciFi movies usually go. Impressive, very impressive.

    Movie reality aside, Europa Report’s more significant value is its realistic take on the particulars of interplanetary space travel, where it puts on a clinic.

22. Circumstantial Surreal 3.0

23. Biological Glib 1.7

24. Physical Glib 2.0