Fantasia Festival ’24: The Silent Planet

**½/****
starring Elias Koteas, Briana Middleton
written and directed by Jeffrey St. Jules

by Walter Chaw Jeffrey St. Jules’s The Silent Planet, despite a small detail about hypoxia, doesn’t appear to be the long-awaited franchise adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s “Space Trilogy.” Rather, it occupies a space with Duncan Jones’s Moon, Walter Hill’s Supernova, David Fincher’s Alien³, and especially Jack Smight’s “Twilight Zone” episode “The Lonely,” in which poor James A. Corey (Jack Warden), a murderer sentenced to solitary confinement on a remote asteroid, is suddenly given a mysterious female companion (Jean Marsh) to ease the horror of his days. The aging murderer sentenced to Life in The Silent Planet is Theodore (Elias Koteas). Terminally ill and convinced that “alien gas” is making him revisit unpleasant episodes from his past, he carves out the monitoring device embedded in his chest, triggering an automated system to presume him dead and ship out his replacement: convicted terrorist Niyya (Briana Middleton). Niyya, orphaned as a child and raised by an alien race called the “Oieans” (who look vaguely like how C.S. Lewis described his pfifltriggi–but again, the film is not based on his Out of the Silent Planet), is understandably embittered about the human government sanctioning the oppression and genocide of her adopted people. Resigned to her fate, she’s unhappy to learn she’s sharing her interstellar oubliette with some nutsy old dude who’s clearly Going Through Something.

A mannered exercise executed through a series of long conversations, The Silent Planet‘s saving grace is that these conversations are well- written and performed. And the concern of the piece is deceptively complex, swirling around questions of the slipperiness of memory–how it, for all its unreliability, is yet the foundation for identity, and how broader cultural sins manifest themselves in both memory and, therefore, identity. It’s dealing, in other words, with the concept of never really being able to live down the sins of your fathers. There’s a striking, startling moment in Kenya Barris’s instantly memory-holed You People where Mo (Sam Jay), best friend of hero Ezra (Jonah Hill), admits after a couple of rounds of sparring that maybe things can never be entirely okay between white and Black people because of the legacy of chattel slavery. As Theodore begins to lose his mind to dementia and/or the “alien gas” he’s sure, Spider-like, is insinuating itself into his brain, he slides between identities–one of which, as a soldier responsible for “cleansing” Niyya’s camp when she was a child, might even be a memory that’s somehow slid from Niyya’s mind into his. For her part, Niyya starts to believe that Theodore is responsible for her life’s greatest trauma, which…he is, indirectly or not. When all of a racial conflict is reduced to this synecdoche (white man/woman of colour), well, one is naturally the stand-in for the eternal oppressor, and the other is the same for the historically oppressed. Once one culture has attempted the genocide of another culture, no matter the historical distance, there will be edges to their dynamic that are unusually sharp and thorns that are unexpectedly cruel.

I joked that The Silent Planet is not an adaptation of C.S. Lewis’s Out of the Silent Planet, except that, in a way, it is. Lewis’s book is essentially about how Earth is a corrupted moral cess that sends its dangerous emissaries into space, where they encounter a planet whose racial and philosophical differences don’t divide them as they do us. Humans are ultimately expelled from this meritocratic utopia as colonial spoilers on an ecclesiastical mission that rejects Nature as the first testament to Grace. It has the feeling, ultimately, of Mary Doria Russell’s The Sparrow–of Kierkegaardian fear and loathing, of real, spiritual despair and disconnection. If The Silent Planet is literally a story about being alone, then it can also be read as a metaphorical story of being Alone. Whatever truths there are in who we are and what we believe are inevitably obscured by our identities: racial, sexual, political, historical. When we meet someone new, they are immediately incorporated into our greater interpretation of the world and our place within it. Other people are just context for understanding of ourselves. The Silent Planet is about that, too: how everyone is the centre of their own stories; the only reason we’re here is to wonder who we are and why we are. Not only is it impossible to know anyone else outside of that personal context, it doesn’t matter, because we’ll be gone soon anyway, our deaths reduced to a plot point in the stories of those who loved us, or hated us. Koteas is extraordinary here, and The Silent Planet is an interesting thought exercise. I’m excited to see what St. Jules does next.