The Titan (2018)
We found this movie while perusing Netflix. I love that Netflix is paying for and distributing original films/programs on their service. What they’re doing for film is what Amazon did for self-published authors: it gives the world more films and movies and takes chances on new ideas.
Of course, when you take a chance on a new idea, there’s the risk that it won’t pan out. I wouldn’t say this film was completely horrible, but it was problematic. It classified itself as science fiction, which is a good general category to put it in.
On the surface, the idea of the story is intriguing. Humans have destroyed the planet and must now head into space and colonize other planets or moons—in the case of the film, the goal is to head to Titan, a moon of Saturn. However, since the environment there isn’t conducive to human life, science has to evolve humans so that they can live there.
Okay, for the most part, I was still on board for this notion. Humans evolved to live on Earth, so I was willing to accept science could force evolution to live on another planet. As the movie progressed, however, my doubts crept in.
If the subjects are being altered so that they can live and thrive on Titan, how is it that they are still able to function on Earth? The two places are completely different environments. Maybe the point was supposed to be that the Titans were supposed to be able to live in any environment? I must have missed that part in the story line.
Then, it became problematic that 3/4 of the test subjects didn’t survive the adaptation. That was expected and explained at the beginning of the film, but how is that supposed to help the rest of humanity? If the goal of the experiments were to make it so humans can live on Titan, but only a few out of the many will survive, doesn’t that kind of doom humanity? PLUS, if we have to change to live on Titan and become Titans, are we still humans?
I’m not exactly sure if that was the purpose of the film and actually asked those questions. I’m not exactly sure what the purpose of the film was. There was a lot going on, including the science-is-bad thing but it’s not totally bad and humans are bad because we destroyed the planet but we’re not totally bad because we can fix it and there’s hope we can live on another world but only a slight hope because not everyone will be able to evolve.
The film was also an incredibly slow burn with no tension. Since I wasn’t exactly sure what the point of the film was, it was hard to feel anything for the characters or figure out what their motives were. Again, I think the idea of the film was much better than the execution.
The movie was only 1 hour and 37 minutes long, but it felt every bit of it. It’s not a film I would watch again or necessarily recommend to others—unless I was hoping they could explain to me what was going on.
Has anyone else seen this movie? What are your thoughts?
