It wouldn’t surprise me in the slightest if it turns out that there was, at some point in the writing process, a much weirder draft of The Titan that perhaps leaned more heavily on body horror. At least, that’s the impression I got from the film, or rather, lack thereof. If this latest release from Netflix has one problem that definitively sinks it, it’s that the film is very bland and devoid of personality.
The story still remains somewhat compelling despite that. The idea of exploring a future where a group of individuals are experimented upon so that they can survive on Jupiter’s moon, Titan, in a last ditch effort to save the human race is an interesting one. Be warned though, the film isn’t some sci-fi epic. It’s a small scale film about the relationship between Rick (Sam Worthington) and Abigail (Taylor Schilling), and how it is challenged as Rick begins experiencing changes from the experimentation led by Professor Collingwood (Tom Wilkinson).
The film never quite has a specific goal in mind. Rick is too dry as a character for us to really latch onto. Abigail is too passive of a character to be the emotional center for the audience. The moments of him experiencing change are never lingered on in a way to express the horror of it. The themes of self-preservation and survival, both on a macro and micro scale, are half-baked at best. It wants so desperately to be something in the vein of The Fly or even Annihilation, but it simply doesn’t have what it takes to pull off what those films did. It’s not heady enough to be heady sci-fi, but it’s also not schlocky enough to be schlock sci-fi. It simply settles for this uninteresting middle ground.
I will give the film that it is handsomely made, not in a way that’s show-offy, but in a way that shows confidence. It’s directed by Lennart Ruff, who is making his feature length debut with a script by Max Hurwitz. There are some effectively eerie shots sprinkled throughout. One moment that stuck with me was around the midpoint where Abigail walks out of her home late at night seeing commotion all around with soldiers and medical crews and whatnot. They surround her neighbor’s home, and a couple of soldiers block her from getting closer. We switch to a sort of POV shot where the camera sneaks a look past the soldiers’ shoulders and we see a shadow of a man through the window of the home. We don’t see what he looks like, but he is very much not his normal self anymore, before his intimidating shadow is eventually shot down by the guards. It can be intense moments like that, or deceptively quiet ones like whenever Rick is calmly sitting at the bottom of his pool, staring upward. I think this director might have potential, and I’d like to see what he brings to the table once he gets his hands on better material.
There is unfortunately not a lot to say about The Titan. While I admittedly had a decent time watching the film, I wished it left a bigger impression on me, especially with such a promising setup. The performances are fine, the film is competently put together. There is nothing about this film that I would call actively “bad,” but it leaves a lot to be desired, and I highly doubt I will remember much about it after a while. If you’re in the mood for adequate but forgettable, middlebrow sci-fi, then maybe The Titan can kill 90 minutes on a rainy afternoon. But then again, it’s bafflingly nonsensical ending will probably make you wish you kept it in your queue.