It is the future, and a catastrophe is threatening the Earth as the new moon has broken free of its orbit thanks to a series of fuel-bearing, red magnetic fields, and if a string of nuclear blasts are not set off by a spaceship that can be piloted through those fields, then it spells the end of all life on our planet. There is only one man who can rescue the population, and he is the mysterious astronaut Paul W.R. (Hugo Becker), son of the scientist and businessman Henri W.R. (Jean Reno) who has designed the spaceship and the mission he is expected to pilot. However, something has gone wrong at the eleventh hour: Paul has gone missing, and the authorities have been alerted to track him down, wherever he may be...
The Last Journey, or Le Dernier Voyage as it was called in its native France, was yet another genre movie to adopt two themes or premises that were prevalent across the twenty-first century. Those were grief and the end of the world, not two subjects exclusive to one another of course, but becoming very familiar at this stage in the millennium as it seemed any protagonist in a science fiction or horror movie was struggling with some emotional loss to give them a bit of depth. Christopher Nolan had boosted this trend with Interstellar, and it seemed science fiction was rife with anguished characters in need of therapy to get them through losing a family member, friend or pet, something to show the audience, look, this is a thinking, feeling person.
This was little different, applying the Nolan Interstellar style to one of those movies that fantasised about the conclusion of it all for us, a matter that had evidently been pressing on the back of the collective consciousness, only to make itself concrete in our fears in the pop culture we entertained ourselves with. Call it the psychological effects of climate change, or the concerns that there were still enough nuclear warheads on the planet to destroy us all many times over, or a more personal crisis that we worried we may not mentally survive born of social media obsession, well: here was a hero to embody all of that in a compact, just under ninety minutes of screen time. Whether Becker was the star to carry that weight on his shoulders was more debatable, but there was a lot to be said for coasting through the hackneyed tropes and enjoying the CGI assisted scenery.
This was a very good-looking film, mostly set in a desert environment with various bells and whistles of design added for futuristic atmosphere, and reminiscent of the sort of artwork you would customarily get in a French comic book of a science fiction inclination. In fact, it appeared to be more in the thrall of an artist like Moebius than it was any tradition in French film, which did not often resort to this genre, though when it did, it would either be miserabilist or containing imagery that, if you were lucky, you would not have seen very often before. That image of the massive red moon hanging menacingly in the blue sky over the characters was such a potent one that director Romain Quirot returned it to over and over, though he had other tricks up his sleeve: the nifty hovercars, for instance, that look customised from scrapyards, or the final flight into the magnetic fields that naturally evoked 2001: A Space Odyssey, but was a lot more Nolan. If you wanted a second-hand science fiction tale that simply had a great appearance to it, this wasn't going to revolutionise the medium, but it passed the time. Music by Etienne Forget.
[The Last Journey, the Sci-Fi action thriller available on digital and DVD from March 7th 2022.]
