Directed by: Aude Léa Rapin
Distributed by: Studio Canal
Written by Taylor Baker
20/100
Another year, another Adèle Exarchopoulos film, and for the first time in a while, a colossal misfire. “Planet B,” Aude Léa Rapin’s sophomore feature, is the type of science fiction film that makes a typical fan of the genre–I count myself as one–have feelings of lamentation towards it. There’s a gaggle of activists; one of them–Julia (Adèle Exarchopoulos)–accidentally lobs a grenade back at a SWAT officer that clattered to the ground in front of her. Another officer shoots her in the eye as she runs away from his mangled corpse, and then she and many of her compatriots wake up in a foreign, seeming to be near-equatorial location. After encountering an invisible forcefield surrounding them, they conclude they’re in a prison. Not a bad premise, if only the execution weren’t so pitiful.
Nour (Souheila Yacoub) our second lead character is an Iraqi journalist who only speaks English. Anyway, Nour is a cleaning woman on a military base who finds a way to enter this prison-like world by wearing a headset that she fished out of a trash conveyor belt line. Her one and seemingly only friend is a local merchant who dislikes her just well enough to help her use the headset without getting tracked. The plot events of this film in and of themselves don’t relegate a work to being poor, but the drab execution and miserablist presentation make for an underwhelming viewing experience.
Despite very early on showing the audience through Nour that this tropical location can be visited by donning a VR headset, the film plays the reveal of there being no Planet B as its big reveal, ham-fisting around very real concerns regarding how conventional power structures will use virtual reality as a tool to disenfranchise, torture, manipulate, control, and appease the masses. But we’ve already had this idea and seen tens of millions of dollars behind it in Spielberg’s adaption of the novel ‘Ready Player One.’ Not to mention Tad Williams’ very good ‘Otherland’ tetralogy.
“Planet B” is a failure. It’s neither an effective dialogue to its ideas nor a good film. It’s painful to watch and incoherent.
“Planet B” Trailer
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