Another Earth (2011)

01 Apr 2023

Rating: 3/5

A woman accidentally kills a family in a car crash while trying to look at a planet ostensibly identical to ours in the sky called Earth 2. When she gets out of prison, she learns that the father was just in a coma and woke up

When she goes to apologize, she cannot bring herself to do it, pretending to be a cleaning service, and their worlds collide again. They help one another heal and voice the part of themselves that their past had silenced

The movie sounds far more sci-fi than it ends up being, focusing instead on the small moments in these two’s life, at least for most of it. It becomes an opportunity for one person to make amends and to help the person whose life she destroyed thaw from the grief that had frozen him in place. And in the process, she learns to trust that voice inside her that asks for more

That’s not to say there’s no sci-fi. We learn not only is Earth 2 the same as ours, but it is also ours, an actual duplicate with replicas of us living the same life, or perhaps that synchronicity stopped the moment the other Earth came into view?

Like Elon Musk trying to get to Mars, a rich guy is trying to get to this other Earth and taking essays as applications. And so, while she applies, voicing her life as a “person on the edge.” People surround her who get into business school, into university, people who are going places, and she feels stuck

With a different director, budget, and other actors… this could’ve been something spectacular. What we get instead is pretty good, though. It makes some late movie choices that take this down a couple of pegs for me, but they don’t ruin the movie

Stray Thoughts


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