Whether one knows it or not, Science Fiction has always suffered under the collective delusion that it isn’t stories about people.
I think this misconception largely stems from the fact that mainstream audiences think the average Science Fiction and Fantasy story is more about its visuals than it is ever about its characters. Do you know what I mean? These movies are about big spaceships or marauding aliens and flashing lasers and fancy costumes and all of that bric-a-brac. In spite of the fact that I’ve always pushed back on that premise, I’m certainly willing to concede that even the most ardent genre enthusiast might come into any cinematic brew expecting something visually out-of-the-ordinary. To some degree, that’s kinda/sorta how these spectacles work. But at the end of the day, I think we’re also cynical enough to dismiss out of hand the idea that the characters don’t matter to the central story. It’s the characters we come back to time and time again; and it’s the characters we look up to and sometimes emulate when given the chance at conventions, online, or even in our private lives. The lack of quality relatable characters kills the forward progress of any motion picture; and genre fans know that as well as anyone else.
Still, I’d argue that not enough effort gets expended sometimes by storytellers in giving these efforts the emotional foundation of such characters. All too often, directors and screenwriters reach a point wherein they might say “this is good enough,” and the end result is that, yes, the flick underperforms in one way or another. Typically, we – as a genre audience – might embrace a project well enough to make it profitable but not so much so that producers feel entirely comfortable returning to that well for another bucket of cash. I like to think this is our response to the makers own shortsightedness – fandom’s way of saying “yeah, this is good enough, too” – and then we can go on our merry way to finding something that really hits the spot a bit more fully.
Regular readers of SciFiHistory.Net know that I don’t champion films all that much. In trying to celebrate everything I can find for the Daily Citation Pages, I leave the MainPage area for more personal reflections on fandom, TV shows, and flicks … but I’m going to use today’s review to encourage those of you who like character-driven stories to check out 2024’s Meanwhile On Earth because it’s about as deserving a personal Science Fiction and Fantasy story as there’s ever been. Written and directed by Jérémy Clapin, this is a chronicle as much as it is for the heart as it is for the mind. The adventure of a women broken over the loss of her big brother, it’s a poignant ‘what if’ accounting of how feelings can push up to the brink in ways we never quite understand as well as challenging us to do the unthinkable even though we know its wrong. The feature might be a bit imperfect … but then again so are all of us.
I think this misconception largely stems from the fact that mainstream audiences think the average Science Fiction and Fantasy story is more about its visuals than it is ever about its characters. Do you know what I mean? These movies are about big spaceships or marauding aliens and flashing lasers and fancy costumes and all of that bric-a-brac. In spite of the fact that I’ve always pushed back on that premise, I’m certainly willing to concede that even the most ardent genre enthusiast might come into any cinematic brew expecting something visually out-of-the-ordinary. To some degree, that’s kinda/sorta how these spectacles work. But at the end of the day, I think we’re also cynical enough to dismiss out of hand the idea that the characters don’t matter to the central story. It’s the characters we come back to time and time again; and it’s the characters we look up to and sometimes emulate when given the chance at conventions, online, or even in our private lives. The lack of quality relatable characters kills the forward progress of any motion picture; and genre fans know that as well as anyone else.
Still, I’d argue that not enough effort gets expended sometimes by storytellers in giving these efforts the emotional foundation of such characters. All too often, directors and screenwriters reach a point wherein they might say “this is good enough,” and the end result is that, yes, the flick underperforms in one way or another. Typically, we – as a genre audience – might embrace a project well enough to make it profitable but not so much so that producers feel entirely comfortable returning to that well for another bucket of cash. I like to think this is our response to the makers own shortsightedness – fandom’s way of saying “yeah, this is good enough, too” – and then we can go on our merry way to finding something that really hits the spot a bit more fully.
Regular readers of SciFiHistory.Net know that I don’t champion films all that much. In trying to celebrate everything I can find for the Daily Citation Pages, I leave the MainPage area for more personal reflections on fandom, TV shows, and flicks … but I’m going to use today’s review to encourage those of you who like character-driven stories to check out 2024’s Meanwhile On Earth because it’s about as deserving a personal Science Fiction and Fantasy story as there’s ever been. Written and directed by Jérémy Clapin, this is a chronicle as much as it is for the heart as it is for the mind. The adventure of a women broken over the loss of her big brother, it’s a poignant ‘what if’ accounting of how feelings can push up to the brink in ways we never quite understand as well as challenging us to do the unthinkable even though we know its wrong. The feature might be a bit imperfect … but then again so are all of us.
(NOTE: The following review will contain minor spoilers necessary solely for the discussion of plot and/or characters. If you’re the type of reader who prefers a review entirely spoiler-free, then I’d encourage you to skip down to the last few paragraphs for the final assessment. If, however, you’re accepting of a few modest hints at ‘things to come,’ then read on …)
From the film’s IMDB.com page citation:
“A 23-year-old girl is contacted by an unknown life form claiming to be able to bring her older brother, who disappeared during a space mission, safely back to Earth.”
We all process grief in different ways, and it’s this core truth that gets a full examination in Meanwhile On Earth.
Elsa Martens (played by Megan Northam) is a bit of a social misfit. Having grown up in a small town and never quite having seen the big city that lies anywhere beyond, all she had was the love of her family and the love of sketching to keep her mind occupied. As fate would have it, her big brother Franck (played briefly by Yoan Germain Le mat) did manage to go far – very far – as an astronaut in some international program; but what did he get in return for his bravery? Though we’re not provided all of the particulars, Franck is listed as ‘lost in space,’ and this harsh consequence for leaving the confines on Earth on behalf of humanity has broken Elsa in ways few ever experience.
However, one evening sitting outside under the stars wishing for her brother’s return, Elsa receives a message from an alien intelligence: though Franck is in a dramatically weakened state, he’s still alive, and he’s being held by them as a kind of hostage. If the young woman is willing to aid them in transferring their respective consciousnesses from these foreign bodies into humans, then her brother can return with them albeit in a new host. Still, she only has a matter of days in order to complete the task or Franck will be lost forever.
Thus, Elsa is tasked with the somewhat Herculean challenge of somehow luring unsuspecting souls into the deep woods wherein a portal exists that allows such spectral transference. At first, she realizes that there are a few elderly patients she cares for at an assisted living facility who she can use, and why not? They’re unhappy with their lives, so she sees the prospect of having their days lived out in a dream state while their bodies are occupied by alien intelligences as being a palatable trade-off. She can live with what she needs to do, snuffing out one light as a substitute for another. In the process, Elsa gives no thought to her patients’ wishes or desires – the alien overlord insists that these human minds will continue to exist in a perpetual dream state – instead allowing her selfish desire to exist (in some state) with her brother once more as enough motivation to sacrifice others.
From the film’s IMDB.com page citation:
“A 23-year-old girl is contacted by an unknown life form claiming to be able to bring her older brother, who disappeared during a space mission, safely back to Earth.”
We all process grief in different ways, and it’s this core truth that gets a full examination in Meanwhile On Earth.
Elsa Martens (played by Megan Northam) is a bit of a social misfit. Having grown up in a small town and never quite having seen the big city that lies anywhere beyond, all she had was the love of her family and the love of sketching to keep her mind occupied. As fate would have it, her big brother Franck (played briefly by Yoan Germain Le mat) did manage to go far – very far – as an astronaut in some international program; but what did he get in return for his bravery? Though we’re not provided all of the particulars, Franck is listed as ‘lost in space,’ and this harsh consequence for leaving the confines on Earth on behalf of humanity has broken Elsa in ways few ever experience.
However, one evening sitting outside under the stars wishing for her brother’s return, Elsa receives a message from an alien intelligence: though Franck is in a dramatically weakened state, he’s still alive, and he’s being held by them as a kind of hostage. If the young woman is willing to aid them in transferring their respective consciousnesses from these foreign bodies into humans, then her brother can return with them albeit in a new host. Still, she only has a matter of days in order to complete the task or Franck will be lost forever.
Thus, Elsa is tasked with the somewhat Herculean challenge of somehow luring unsuspecting souls into the deep woods wherein a portal exists that allows such spectral transference. At first, she realizes that there are a few elderly patients she cares for at an assisted living facility who she can use, and why not? They’re unhappy with their lives, so she sees the prospect of having their days lived out in a dream state while their bodies are occupied by alien intelligences as being a palatable trade-off. She can live with what she needs to do, snuffing out one light as a substitute for another. In the process, Elsa gives no thought to her patients’ wishes or desires – the alien overlord insists that these human minds will continue to exist in a perpetual dream state – instead allowing her selfish desire to exist (in some state) with her brother once more as enough motivation to sacrifice others.
The best stories speak to the choices that we make as humans, and they challenge us in ways that force us to consider what we might do had we found ourselves in similar circumstances.
To Elsa, these early barters – giving the broken down and mentally deficient elderly a chance to live out their days, albeit in a dream – are easy selections. They make sense as they’re not truly hurting anyone, and one might argue that they’re even better for humanity since these patients have entered that dark phase of mortal existence wherein they might be more of a burden than they are a benefit to society at large. As the stakes are raised and the prospects dwindle to wherein the young lady must weigh harsher options, it grows increasingly clear to her that she’s still sacrificed some of herself in the process – perhaps too much – and she realizes that playing God isn’t so easy after all. How can you effectively choose what life is more important than others? And once your choice is made how little of you actually resides within yourself because you crossed a moral line that none of us were ever empowered to cross?
The other day, I wrote about the fact that Science Fiction storytellers far too often take the easy route to condemning mankind for the choices that we’ve made along our way through the cosmos because – in my estimation – that’s the easy thing to do. It’s become far too commonplace for these various mythmakers to sit back and judge what we, culturally, may or may not have done wrong. We don’t always know what the future holds, and just like Elsa never dreamed she’d lose her brother when he followed his vision to explore the Final Frontier she still had to confront that harsh turn of Fate when it arrived. It broke her. It diminished her world in ways she couldn’t previously imagine. This pain and hurt inevitably forced her to do things she likely never imagined she’d have to do in the pursuit of healing. And yet once she realized what the cost to her soul would be she managed to find the human strength to stop.
Maybe going forward, I’d encourage all Science Fiction and Fantasy screenwriters to celebrate such revelations instead of painting all of their films with colors so dark. Find the goodness in people – just as Clapin does in this wonderfully unique and thought-provoking story – and seek out new ways to tell these. I realize that they might be missing some of the stark visuals that fans have come to accept, and I realize that – in the process – we might have to reeducate audiences to the limitless possibilities that come when we dabble deep into the realms of the Fantastic. Still, Elsa emerges as one of the most relatable heroines I’ve seen in one of the quietest and touching features in a long time; and she’s exactly the kind of tortured spirit genre films need to see more of.
To Elsa, these early barters – giving the broken down and mentally deficient elderly a chance to live out their days, albeit in a dream – are easy selections. They make sense as they’re not truly hurting anyone, and one might argue that they’re even better for humanity since these patients have entered that dark phase of mortal existence wherein they might be more of a burden than they are a benefit to society at large. As the stakes are raised and the prospects dwindle to wherein the young lady must weigh harsher options, it grows increasingly clear to her that she’s still sacrificed some of herself in the process – perhaps too much – and she realizes that playing God isn’t so easy after all. How can you effectively choose what life is more important than others? And once your choice is made how little of you actually resides within yourself because you crossed a moral line that none of us were ever empowered to cross?
The other day, I wrote about the fact that Science Fiction storytellers far too often take the easy route to condemning mankind for the choices that we’ve made along our way through the cosmos because – in my estimation – that’s the easy thing to do. It’s become far too commonplace for these various mythmakers to sit back and judge what we, culturally, may or may not have done wrong. We don’t always know what the future holds, and just like Elsa never dreamed she’d lose her brother when he followed his vision to explore the Final Frontier she still had to confront that harsh turn of Fate when it arrived. It broke her. It diminished her world in ways she couldn’t previously imagine. This pain and hurt inevitably forced her to do things she likely never imagined she’d have to do in the pursuit of healing. And yet once she realized what the cost to her soul would be she managed to find the human strength to stop.
Maybe going forward, I’d encourage all Science Fiction and Fantasy screenwriters to celebrate such revelations instead of painting all of their films with colors so dark. Find the goodness in people – just as Clapin does in this wonderfully unique and thought-provoking story – and seek out new ways to tell these. I realize that they might be missing some of the stark visuals that fans have come to accept, and I realize that – in the process – we might have to reeducate audiences to the limitless possibilities that come when we dabble deep into the realms of the Fantastic. Still, Elsa emerges as one of the most relatable heroines I’ve seen in one of the quietest and touching features in a long time; and she’s exactly the kind of tortured spirit genre films need to see more of.
Simply put, Elsa makes us better for having been among us; and that’s food for thought.
Some might dismiss a film like Meanwhile On Earth because instead of going big it works very hard to keep things small. While considering the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe, Clapin arguable pushes the door open with an answer uniquely all of his own and yet he doesn’t quite celebrate the conclusion the way studios typically expect. No building-sized spaceship lands on the White House lawn. No army of stylishly designed aliens climb out of any blinking shuttlecraft. In fact, his incarnation of an extraterrestrial entity is little more than a seed – one that Elsa puts in her ear to establish contact – and that’s all it takes to see that there’s a whole galaxy of opportunity out there waiting for discovery.
Yet, instead of traveling the already worn-down paths asking about whether there remains life after death, Clapin and company concern themselves with the query of “Is there life after life?” Can we do what we must to survive and continue to live not only with ourselves but also the potentially grave consequences of our own acts, selfish or otherwise? These aren’t giant outcomes. These aren’t big stakes. They’re small. They’re infinitesimal when compared to the vastness of the galaxy and consciousness … but they do not come without penalties.
Some might dismiss a film like Meanwhile On Earth because instead of going big it works very hard to keep things small. While considering the question of whether or not we’re alone in the universe, Clapin arguable pushes the door open with an answer uniquely all of his own and yet he doesn’t quite celebrate the conclusion the way studios typically expect. No building-sized spaceship lands on the White House lawn. No army of stylishly designed aliens climb out of any blinking shuttlecraft. In fact, his incarnation of an extraterrestrial entity is little more than a seed – one that Elsa puts in her ear to establish contact – and that’s all it takes to see that there’s a whole galaxy of opportunity out there waiting for discovery.
Yet, instead of traveling the already worn-down paths asking about whether there remains life after death, Clapin and company concern themselves with the query of “Is there life after life?” Can we do what we must to survive and continue to live not only with ourselves but also the potentially grave consequences of our own acts, selfish or otherwise? These aren’t giant outcomes. These aren’t big stakes. They’re small. They’re infinitesimal when compared to the vastness of the galaxy and consciousness … but they do not come without penalties.
Meanwhile On Earth (2024) was produced by One World Films, Carcadice, France 3 Cinéma, Auvergne Rhône-Alpes Cinéma, Umedia, and a few other participants. (For a full accounting, check out the film’s full listing available on IMDB.com.) According to a quick Google.com search, the picture is presently available both theatrically as well as via a variety of streaming platforms. As for the technical specifications? While I’m no trained video expert, I found the provided sights-and-sounds to be exceptional: I wasn’t quite won over by the included animation snippets, but they served a narrative purpose, and I can’t imagine the story being nearly as impactful without them. Lastly, if you’re looking for special features? I viewed this one via streaming, so there were no special features under consideration.
Recommended.
Meanwhile On Earth (2024) starts a bit slow, and it certainly takes its sweet time setting up its relationships and visuals. However, once it hits its mark, the story turns out to be a surprisingly heartfelt and bittersweet yarn between siblings, all of it given a SciFi construct in which to demonstrate that – although love never ends – we might not get to spend eternity together after all. Imagine Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956) told from the point of view of You Can Count On Me (2000), and you get a bit closer to the complex personal story of a sister broken by a tragic loss who ultimately refuses to sacrifice her humanity to be united with her big brother. Ladies (or the emotionally involved), bring Kleenex.
In the interests of fairness, I’m pleased to disclose that the fine folks at One World Films provided me with complimentary streaming access to Meanwhile On Earth (2024) by request for the expressed purpose of completing this review. Their contribution to me in no way, shape, or form influenced my opinion of it.
-- EZ
Recommended.
Meanwhile On Earth (2024) starts a bit slow, and it certainly takes its sweet time setting up its relationships and visuals. However, once it hits its mark, the story turns out to be a surprisingly heartfelt and bittersweet yarn between siblings, all of it given a SciFi construct in which to demonstrate that – although love never ends – we might not get to spend eternity together after all. Imagine Invasion Of The Body Snatchers (1956) told from the point of view of You Can Count On Me (2000), and you get a bit closer to the complex personal story of a sister broken by a tragic loss who ultimately refuses to sacrifice her humanity to be united with her big brother. Ladies (or the emotionally involved), bring Kleenex.
In the interests of fairness, I’m pleased to disclose that the fine folks at One World Films provided me with complimentary streaming access to Meanwhile On Earth (2024) by request for the expressed purpose of completing this review. Their contribution to me in no way, shape, or form influenced my opinion of it.
-- EZ
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