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Sweden, Denmark · 2019
Rated R · 1h 46m
Director Pella Kågerman, Hugo Lilja
Starring Emelie Jonsson, Arvin Kananian, Bianca Cruzeiro, Anneli Martini
Genre Drama, Science Fiction
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Based on the epic poem by Harry Martinson, Aniara follows the story of a spaceship drifting through space. After the earth is no longer habitable, a group of astronauts attempt to make their way to Mars, but on the way, the spaceship is knocked off course. Too damaged to fix, the passengers must accept their fate.
ANIARA has plenty going for it — a great concept, a coherent tone, an uncompromising vision, and an ending that’s the ballsiest thing I’ve seen since AI. Sadly these virtues are undercut by some unforgivable sins — it is boring, has underdeveloped characters, and has a childlike understanding of the scientific concepts supposedly undergirding the plot. One of those could be forgivable, but all together they spell doom.
The Globe and Mail (Toronto) by Barry Hertz
Yet while last month’s Claire Denis drama "High Life" will go down as one of the year’s ultimate masterpieces, the Swedish soul-crusher Aniara will likely be remembered as an ambitious if ultimately weaker curiosity: the "Antz" to Denis’s "A Bug’s Life" (a sentence I never thought I’d be able to employ, but here we are).
The filmmakers are interested in world building only as a pretext for maintaining a tone of non-contemplative ennui.
This tale of a spaceship stuck wandering the cosmos after being forced off course is both impressive in its scope and intimate in its portrait of human nature under long-term duress.
San Francisco Chronicle by G. Allen Johnson
Aniara has an intriguing premise, and it’s even fascinating at times, but despite an excellent production design, it never gets off the ground even as it speeds through the cosmos. The characters are not fully formed, so we’re not invested in their futures.
The Film Stage by Jared Mobarak
Kågerman and Lilja bring Martinson’s poem to cinemas with a stark beauty both in its sci-fi production design and emotionally wrought performances.
Aniara is science fiction cinema from the land of Bergman and Strindberg — sharply observed, just brittle enough to fend of sentiment, bleak when bleak is what is called for.
The Hollywood Reporter by Todd McCarthy
It’s a film that wants to be visionary but isn’t.
Parts of the film aren’t pretty because people don’t always act in pretty ways, and the speculation that such an event might create its own hermetically sealed reality, one increasingly distorted to our eyes, is intriguing, if not especially deep. It all plays out like a “Big Brother” reality show with 5,000 participants and no Big Brother.
The bleak warning of this environmental parable notwithstanding, this is arresting, frequently unsettling, cinema.
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