Europa Report

Solid Speculative Documentary with some Science / Plot flaws
By calling Europa Report a speculative documentary, I mean to put it in the same style category of Discovery Channel et. al. efforts like "Supervolcano" and "Alien Contact." It invokes the feel of a National Geographic expedition documentary.

Overall, a great effort for a fairly low budget film. The bad science issues are minor - most notable are the rotating arm of the spaceship with no counter rotation of the rest of the ship (Newton's third law anyone?) and the apparently full Earth gravity on Europa.

The plot devices I consider flaws are unrealistic scenarios like: the problems encountered during the spacewalk, the lack of mission planning that threw such a huge wrench into the crew's plans after landing a mere 100 meters from their intended landing site, a lack of ANY redundant way to communicate with Mission Control, and a few questionable decisions by the crew. (I liken the extension of the surface walk to the classic...

Humans-they taste like chicken
I have mixed feelings on this one. It is an attempt to redo 2001 but with a bit more science and a bit less flash. The dialogue and fuzzy pictures got quite tiresome after awhile. I know all the static was an attempt to make it look more real, but I actually like to see what's happening.
Now, there actually have been proposals to travel to Europa and drill through the ice, so I like the concept, but I really wasn't riveted, and the ending was just not satisfying. Of course, what made it worse was the ending speech by the program director back on earth trying to make it all noble and uplifting. It was just too smaltzy. It was OK, but certainly not more than that.

Not perfect, but one of the best movies I've seen in a while
This is indie sci-fi. Hence, it has flaws, partly due to the limitations that it gets from being "indie" as opposed to a Hollywood-funded gig.

With that said, this haunted me. The hard-science aspects of it are pretty good, at least in terms of plausibility. (Don't get stuck on the fact that some of the footage is of actual rockets that couldn't possibly launch a major interplanetary craft or other details like that...) There are other tidbits that as a true space-nut I could nit-pick, but what I really liked was the fact that it seemed like the film makers made a real effort to ask "What if we did have a mission like this? What would be the things that could realistically go right or wrong? How would it affect both the people involved and the people back on Earth?"

There are aspects of the movie that seemed like they were heading toward "thriller" territory, but they really didn't get there. Sure, there's dramatic tension and some...

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