by Mark Gabrish Conlan • Copyright © 2019 by Mark Gabrish Conlan • All rights reserved
The other film on the program, 2036: Origin Unknown, had a bigger (though still relatively now by modern
moviemaking standards) budget and loftier aspirations but didn’t work as well.
The backstory is that in 2030 the world sent its first human-piloted mission to
Mars and the spaceship actually made it to the Red Planet, only some sort of
Martian electrical storm, a self-defense system from whatever technology was
left on Mars, or something
brought it down in a crash landing and killed everyone aboard. Therefore the
super-agency running the world’s space program decided not to send any more
people to Mars. Instead they developed a super-computer called ARTI —
addressed, naturally, as “Artie” — and put it in charge of the next Mars mission in 2036, with the
human commander, Mackenzie “Mac” Wilson (attractive, personable and talented
Katie Sackhoff, who really deserved a better vehicle), relegated to a supporting
role. Through most of the movie the only people we see are Mac and her sister
Lena (Julie Cox), and even Lena we only see on a video screen through which she
and Mac are passing instructions and information about the mission. There’s
also Sterling Brooks (played by an African-British actor named Ray Fearon), who
apparently was once Mac’s lover and is either alive or dead — he was supposed
to go on the first mission, and either he did and what we see is just his
hallucination, or he survived on Earth and gets called in to supply a critical
computer password when things start going wrong.
ARTI controls the Mars Rover
which is supposed to land on the planet and travel around it to look for signs
of the first expedition and find out what happened to it. Through their video
feeds they discover a mysterious black cube on the surface of Mars which
somehow teleports to Earth and ends up in Antarctica. Obviously the Earthlings involved in this project, both human
and artificial, have hooked up with some alien race that has far advanced
technology — we’re told that between 2030 and 2036 humans discovered a
communications channel that can send radio signals faster than the speed of
light (what in the original Star Trek they called “subspace radio”) — and anyone who’s seen 2001:
A Space Odyssey will note all the
Kubrick/Clarke elements this film’s writer-director, Hasraf Dullul, is ripping
off: the monolith, the super-computer than can talk and ultimately goes crazy,
even a psychedelic sequence at the end. And 2001 isn’t the only Kubrick film Dullul and his writing
partner Gary Cole rip off: at the end ARTI decides to set off all the world’s
extant nuclear weapons, blowing it up and making it uninhabitable to humans.
Then Dullul and Cole cop the ending of Karel Capek’s R.U.R. and have the super-computer reproduce a world full
of androids who will populate it now that there is no longer any oxygen to
sustain human life — in the film’s most chilling scene ARTI informs Mac that
she is now the last human alive, and when she uses up all the oxygen in her
enclosed room she will die and the human race will be extinct forever. It’s
obvious the makers of 2036: Origin Unknown had lofty
ambitions, but they came up with an intermittently interesting but also
claustrophobic movie — it’s so tightly confined to that one high-tech
headquarters it would probably work as well or better as a stage play than a
film — and the ending has a sense of tragedy but also seems futile. The movie
is so derivative we expect to hear both Richard Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra and Vera Lynn singing “We’ll Meet Again” on its
soundtrack!
