LOVE - The Movie. A Review.
My initial intention was to watch the film and review it right after. I chose not to do so because it left me a bit confused after the first watch. Even after the second time, I was left a bit confused about it. After the third time, I went online, to see if anyone else that had viewed it was left confused. Turns out, a lot of people were, and for the same reason I was. I found one explanation that made ALOT of the film make much more sense to me, and I’m sure it would to anyone else that was in the same boat as me. While I still don’t completely understand the last 15 minutes of the film, I think I have a much better understanding of the film as a whole, now. Below I have copied the explanation that I found, as well as my thoughts on the film as a whole.
The film is an abstract narrative about the fragility of life and the connections we have to each other as human beings. It begins with the sole survivor of a platoon in the Civil War who happens to see the Ark. Actually, it begins with a shot of the Earth that suddenly seems to rewind… It’s as if that’s the moment the Ark went back in time (as it seems to have been designed to do). Then we see the civil war.
Images of war are a recurring theme because war is something destructive that we keep doing to ourselves. It’s perhaps because the Civil War was the bloodiest war ever fought in America, and one in which we divided against ourselves, that maybe the developers of the Ark decided (or it was just artistic coincidence) that it would be most relevant to warn people about the self-destructive future they are headed for if they don’t figure out that this planet is all we have.
Director William Eubank had said at the Santa Barbara Film Festival that he was partly inspired by Carl Sagan’s Pale Blue Dot, in which Sagan had a revelation when seeing the photo taken by Voyager I at a distance of about 6 billion kilometers from Earth. We’re just a tiny dot in a vast cosmos.
In the future, Capt. Lee Miller, the astronaut, is experiencing isolation and loneliness on the International Space Station. He is connected to the other Captain from the civil war through a journal he mysteriously discovers aboard the ISS. Whether the journal is real or he’s imagining it isn’t clear… but that’s not what matters. The astronaut begins to feel the connection to the civil war soldier, and this is where the objective of the whole narrative as a circular storytelling mechanism comes into full view.
What’s happening from the bits and pieces of other film we see… from the explosions on Earth to fragmented radio messages, then radio silence, and the seemingly unrelated interview clips (which we later discover to be archival material) is that the world in the future has broken out into some kind of catastrophic war that leaves no one.
If you watch carefully, you’ll notice there’s a period of nearly ten years that Lee has been up on the ISS. During that time, mankind has built what I call NOAH’s Ark. Look at the book he finds… it contains an index of all the humans they interviewed so that there would be some record left of who we are. NOAH, you’ll notice in the index book, stands for National Organization of Archival History. “Noah’s ark” is a concept that is only meaningful to humans, so I believe that humans (not aliens as some people think) had built the ark as a last ditch effort to leave a literal time capsule of mankind for someone to find.
From there, you can interpret the final sequence in many ways… What did Lee experience in the last room? Was he dead? Was his consciousness downloaded into the Ark’s archival servers so he could “connect” with the memories of those interviewed? Doesn’t matter… the film has already made its point, just as Carl Sagan’s Contact did, that the only thing that makes it bearable to live on this speck of dust floating in an endless space is the connection to each other.
If we don’t get some perspective about how fragile this environment is, and that while scientists are discovering there could be trillions of planets of life in the universe, they’re too distant for us to journey to… and this planet is it. This is where we make our lives mean something or nothing… and the universe won’t miss us when we are gone. We’re utterly replaceable… the only ones our existence matters to is each other. This is the central point of the film and why the war themes are in there, as a warning.
My Thoughts: Overall, I really enjoyed it, and I think I would have enjoyed it even more if they had a bigger budget to make it (Everything was done for just $500,000). Budget aside (and you have to keep the budget in mind throughout the film) I think its a film that any fan of Angels & Airwaves should watch, as well as anyone who enjoys independent films. The meaning behind it is something that everyone should think about once, even if its only for the hour and twenty minutes while they are watching it. I was expecting a little more music to be in it, but the little bits of it that are are very well placed, and fit in well with it. I thought that the LOVE Part One and Part Two albums would be more like a soundtrack to the film, but I think that the film gives the songs more meaning, even though they are not included in it.
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