Aniara is a 1960 Swedish TV movie that's based on the 1956 Aniara poem by Harry Martinson. It's been turned into a science fiction opera Karl-Birger Blomdahl and Erik Lindegren. It was preformed several times in 1959. The TV version was directed by Arne Arnbom. There's a 2018 adaptation that I haven't seen.
The story is about a spaceship that is transporting people from Earth to Mars. It has a collision with an asteroid and winds up lost in space. It's a very minimalist production, there are only a few sets, you can get an idea of them from the pictures. Sadly there seem to be very few images available online and the download I found crashes VLC Player when I try to do a screen capture. The download has English subtitles. I found it a hard slog, it helped to speed it up a bit. There's not a lot of story exposition, between the singing bits there is a good bit of dead space with nothing much happening. There's also a good bit of interpretive dance. I thought the concept was interesting, I liked the costumes and sets, the opera style is of little interest to me, though I have liked bits of opera music from time to time. Glad to have seen it, I'll keep the download but it's likely I won't bother to watch it again. You can read about the poem and see the TV movie in the links in the titles above.
Astro is a 2018 SF movie directed by Asif Akbar, he wrote it with Bernard Selling. It's about a rich guy's space program, Alexander Biggs is working with some ancient aliens from another dimension. They've built a space craft and taken it into space, they returned with a captured alien that has the DNA of a guy named Jack, a guy that Biggs knew from his Army days. Biggs wants to know how that DNA got there and he goes after Jack. There's plenty of running about and stuff you'd expect in a low budget SF movie, lots of yakking and walking through corridors. It goes on and on and I was not liking it much at all. Especially when it ended on a cliff hanger. I speed this one up too. I'm getting to old to waste time on this sort of thing. Don't watch it. I found it at Dollar Tree for a buck, I'll keep it to remind me that I wasted that buck. I won't watch it again, out of spite.
Comments