The journey to Mars is a reality in the ambitious sci-fi drama Aniara

With the way humans are treating the planet, it’s inevitable that at some point in time we will need to make our escape and find a home elsewhere. Some suggest that next home is Mars, though with terraforming that red planet only the stuff of board games right now, it’s likely a long time before we will ever know where our future might lie.

Aniara though is a new Swedish sci-fi that looks to explore this potentially bleak future that may lie ahead for the human race. However, as futuristic as its sci-fi setting is, it is actually based on an old poem published all the way back in 1956 by Nobel Prize winner Harry Martinson. it’s about a colonist spaceship headed for Mars that is knocked off-course, sending its crew plummeting into existential despair. It’s an ambitious poem filled with bold ideas and deep questions of our own reality. Will it work as a movie though – well, let’s take a look at the trailer for the film which has now arrived:

I’m a huge fan of deep sci-fi movies that get you thinking and this definitely looks set to be one of them. However, as bold as this one looks, it also appears to be a little too existential for my liking and could be a difficult watch as it moves between its apocalyptical sci-fi setting and philosophical musings that could easily bog it down.

Still, its great to see a film as ambitious and unconventional as this get made and credit should go to writer-directors Pella Kagerman and Hugo Lilja for adapting this complex work into film. At the very least, the movie is to be a visual spectacle when it releases in the US on May 17th. There are no plans for Aniara locally yet, but given South Africa’s reluctance to embrace foreign language films such as this, I wouldn’t expect much of a theatrical run and this could be one of those movies we end up getting on a streaming service in the near future.

Last Updated: March 6, 2019