Rubikon review: a sci-fi movie that leaves its morality play stranded in orbit

The stakes don’t get much bigger or the canvas much smaller than in RubikonThe sci-fi drama “The End of the Earth” is set on an orbiting space station. There, a handful of characters — just three, for most of the film’s length — stare out of their windows at a world that’s choking to death on toxic fog. They feel like they ought to go down to the surface and try to save humanity, but they’re not sure they can bring themselves to leave the safety of their orbiting cocoon.

This is also a COVID movie. Rubikon’s tiny cast and minimal production probably have more to do with its budget and origin (it’s Austrian-made, though mostly in English) than when it was made. Leni Luritsch was the director for the first time. She had topics such as global climate change or the European refugee crises in her head when she wrote the film. But as she was shooting during the second wave of coronavirus, the parallels became inescapable for her and her actors, and they’re inescapable for viewers now.

It’s an emotional connection. Rubikon This film is about isolation and insularity. It shows how it’s easy for our horizons shrink even though we can see the Earth’s curvature from our bedroom windows. All of us can relate. On a moral level, however — and this is very much a morality play in the guise of a contained, pressure-cooker thriller — it’s about weighing your responsibility to yourself and your family against your responsibility to society. It’s difficult to understand because the metaphor has so many exaggerated elements, such as the future of mankind on one end and three people in the tin on the other that it doesn’t make sense.

Gavin Abbott, Hannah Wagner and Dimitri Krylow look concerned in space suits with red lighting in Rubikon

Photo: Philipp Brozsek/IFC Midnight

Film is set in 2056 when the air quality has become so poor that top echelons live in climate-controlled geodomes. Society is at its lowest point and nations are being replaced by corporations. Hannah Wagner (Julia Franz Richter) is a Special-ops soldier working for one of the companies. She is assigned to the Rubikon (a large space station equipped with small crew members), where Dimitri Krylow, Mark Ivanir, has developed a system that allows unlimited supply of fresh, clean air. Gavin Abbott (George Blagden), an environmentalist and chemist, is with Hannah. His parents were wealthy enough to arrange the Rubikon gig for him.

At the very start of the film, something happens to the AI navigation system of Hannah and Gavin’s shuttlecraft, forcing them to dock with the station manually — for no apparent reason other than to demonstrate both Hannah’s military competence and sang-froid, and Lauritsch’s sure hand as a director with suspense set-pieces. She repeatedly shows her ability to create tension using unflashy editing and leaving the work of the sound designer and actors to do all the hard work. You can see these moments. Rubikon It is in its most fleeting form.

Films that are dramatized tend to be less confident. The script is in an early phase that seems to be in a rush to get nowhere. Jessica Lind, Lauritsch’s screenwriter, fails to adequately set up characters, plot, world and stakes. All of the international cast are at sea. They occasionally delve into sub-dubbed German or Russian and leave the audience confused. Things settle a little when half the crew (including Dimitri’s son) departs the station and Lauritsch can focus on the three who remain: Hannah, Gavin, and Dimitri.

Hannah Wagner on the space station Rubikon

Photo: Philipp Brozsek/IFC Midnight

Particularly, the situation in Earth remains unclear. Things are clearly dire, but they become suddenly more severe and potentially fatally worse as a cloud of poisonous gas surrounds the Earth, seemingly eliminating any human life. The viewers must piece together silent and inexplicable reaction shots as well as snippets of hand-waving explanations to figure out when this happened and what it means. As cataclysms go, it’s weirdly muted — although the visuals of the Earth turning from cloud-streaked blue to glowering brown have a distant power.

Lauritsch constructs a neat parallel to this, and another effective visual cue, as the bright-green algae panels that supply the Rubikon’s crew with their air start to curdle and darken. The reasons are unexpected, but this also sadly marks the point where Lauritsch loses her grip on the story’s credibility for the sake of her message.

The algae cultures are obviously of critical value to the survival of the human race on Earth, but Lauritsch’s scheme requires that the characters debate whether they should fly them down at all. Gavin the environmentalist thinks they should. Dimitri, a scientist, has contrived reasons why he wants to continue aboard the Rubikon. Hannah, the pragmatic operator, finds herself in the middle.

All three actors are likable enough, and Richter brings a committed, wiry intensity to Hannah’s supposed dilemma. But at no point does it really seem like a real moral question, and as a result, few of Hannah’s choices ring true. Even though Lauritsch works hard to tip the scales — giving Hannah a strong personal incentive to stay, and invoking the specter of corporate greed and callousness on the surface — she can’t succeed in balancing them. A selfish, hollow existence that haunts the graveyard of mankind. The other side is an effort to protect the future humankind no matter what moral or risk. I’d like to think I wouldn’t hesitate the way they do.

Lauritsch, in an effort to get out of her moral dilemma, springs two distinct deus exmachinas. None of them feels earned. Rubikon’s plot crash-lands while its sincere intentions are left spinning fruitlessly in space, looking for a way back down.

Rubikon The debut of the movie “The First Time” in Theaters, and on Demand on July 1

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