Music
accompanies most films, but rarely is a full-length film made to accompany a
piece of music. One exception is this pretentious
and derivative science-fiction head trip, commissioned by the band
Angels and Airwaves – the current project of former Blink 182
frontman Tom DeLonge – to tie in with their 2010 album Love.
The
first stretch of the film is a feeble imitation of The Thin Red
Line, with fragmentary images of the American Civil War backed by
a folksy philosophical voiceover. Then we move onto the main event –
a feeble imitation of 2001: A Space Odyssey with the star
Gunner Wright alone on screen much of the time as an astronaut far
from home and slowly cracking up.
The
uneventful storyline might not have been a problem, except that the
writer-director William Eubank has no clue how to depict feelings of
boredom and frustration without making the viewer feel bored and
frustrated as well. The music is wishy-washy ambient stuff, hard to care about
either way.
A
sometime camera technician, Eubank reportedly worked on Love for four
years, shooting on sets built in his parents' backyard and enlisting
the help of the local historical re-enactment club. Under the
circumstances, the images are reasonably polished, using an ingenious
range of technical tricks – askew close-ups, eerie lighting,
restricted depth of field – to make up for limited resources.
Eubank may well have a future as a cinematographer, or in the special
effects business. But a filmmaker he ain't.
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