At one point during Another Earth's treacherous romp toward the very darkest spaces of its navel, the voices of speculation that eke out of the fictional media from time to time suggest the communications being built between the Earth and its new sister planet, Earth 2, resemble the biblical Tower of Babel, referring perhaps to a synchronization of efforts for a single human goal not seen since God played his first joke on the pride of Man.
The movie, itself, could serve as its own abandoned tower. The foundation it builds from? A question: What if, living on the surface of Earth 2, there's "another me" out there?
So the question is asked, but the makers of this movie never seem to be too interested in providing an interesting answer, an answer precluded from ever finding itself by the very phrasing of the question. The scenario that articulates the question is pitifully binary and never crawls out of the blissfully ignorant quagmire of being trite. The characters at the center of the movie are miserable and down-on-their-luck, so naturally, everything for the -lings of Earth Dos must be peachy-keen, the realization of every dream. Think of them up there, puttin' on the ritz as can only be done on Earth 2... What if this other me hasn't shared my struggles, made my same mistakes? It's from this angle that the image of Earth 2 in orbit gains all its intrigue, the mystique of the unknown. This is something that the makers of Another Earth seem to understand, flaunting the CGI pie in the sky at every turn.
But the real question is how relevant could a personal duplicate be? Why would it matter? What difference would it make? Having an unknown duplicate on another planet amounts to just a curiosity, a fantasy at best. But actually meeting the duplicate reduces her to a mere twin, a twin who in the case of our hero just flaunts her success as some sort of cheesy moral affirmation for the struggling would-be-scientist in a janitor's outfit on our side of the dime.
It's as if the people behind this movie planted a bag of magic beans, of which rose a giant bean-stalk reaching into the upper stratosphere, where the ideas at the center of the story each took their turn climbing one after the other like lemmings who eventually meet their doom (as lemmings do) frozen and oxygen-starved somewhere far from the top, stuck to the glorified bean sprout by the frost of their last breaths, still stretching out their finger-tips over their heads, not quite touching the next branch above, in an effort to make the Question driving it all seem important. Meanwhile, down below, the goose that lays the Golden Eggs of Feeling prances in the spring waters of an oasis. This oasis could have just been a mirage (maybe not), but nobody ever bothered to find out, content as they all were with the shake 'n' bake drama of brooding, Twilit faces.
After all, the Atlas who holds Another Earth on his back depends on the dubious strength of vanity, and like all vanities, it fails to measure up to the empathy demanded of a true soul worthy of the Atlas name; for the real Atlas never suffered the burden of the Earth out of strength of body, but strength of spirit. His cinematic doppelganger, however, abandons the struggle of keeping the movie from falling into the void almost as soon as it starts. More concerned with the ironic pride of self-pity, he instead, chooses to measure his own shadow up against the emptiness of a black hole, only to be ripped apart, atom from atom, ego and all, 24 frames per second, by the ever-triumphant swallower, Comeuppance, until the shadow is the only thing left, melded (as it always was) to the shadow of space.
It's a shame that a group of people so infatuated with the concept of making a movie haven't yet discovered the medium for what it really is. Maybe they can't be blamed, though, as the nature and purpose of film isn't exactly a maxim to be repeated or something to be pinned down with a fly-swatter. It's a subject more likely to be found leading Orpheus from his lonely bedside to the shrouded corners of Hades, after finding the gate to hell underneath his pillow. Fantastic? Sure. It could be said, though, that the right question, if asked, could lead, cutting through the divide, where honey might be found in the belly of a lion, or where tapping a rock could yield a spring of water, the way prayers save a soul from spiritual drought. The daring might even find a counter-symphonic maelstrom of devils who spill forth with a question of their own (which tongue forks the right way?). But perhaps just as telling as any peek behind the divine curtain is the moth that can't resist the touch of a lamp, as it gently brushes itself against the bulb, as if its very mothness were trying to merge with the light, passing through the hidden translucence of the body, wings fluttering in a blur.
In a parallel universe, a film not made, a young woman climbs a ladder to the moon in her soul where she is left breathless, warm like a cat on its back, as she is met on one side by a pisces starfish that has pinwheels for hands, and the pisces' pisces coming from the other horizon is a shiva in the young woman's own image, skin blue as the depths of the waters staring back at the cosmos on the far side of her triplet Earth, a third eye with a gaze more stoic than the cold, dead core of their round, shared moon. And beneath the ornate, gold plates of worship strung along this shiva's dazzling necklace, resting in the shrouded solitude of her ribcage, lies a heart that if exposed to the clinical light of observation would reveal streams of galaxies pumping through her body with bruising intensity, like the purple spots burned in one's vision when needy eyes ask the sun too many questions.
Time holds out his fingers like a gun and presses them against the young woman's back.
Do you surrender?
A moment to think. Another to consider. Bang: as he lowers his raised thumb, signaling the shot whose trajectory will lace her persona like a pearl to all the nebulous bonanza of eternity, hemming existence, like Wendy sowing Peter's want-away shadow back to the soles of his feet.
