Aeranger: a meditation on how duty, self-sacrifice and love of one’s people have far-reaching consequences

Anthony Ferraro, “Aeranger” (2019)

A twelve-minute film about an alien crash-landing somewhere in North America thousands of years ago when mammoths were still roaming the continent and humans had just entered it becomes, in director Anthony Ferraro’s hands, a meditation on self-sacrifice, duty and how one’s role in the scheme of things, no matter how small it might seem, has the potential to change history and even direct the course of future civilisations many aeons later. Alien visitor Kallelle (Bobbie Breckenridge) emerges out of her wrecked spacecraft and grabs a small metal container. Critically injured, she manages to make her way through the landscape – it’s a forest beside a small shallow valley – and finds a spot to plant a seedling. After sending a hostile earthling (Nic Kretz) on his way, she makes contact with an alien (Damo Sultan) back home and he asks her how her mission is proceeding. We learn from their terse conversation that their home planet is dying from an unimaginable catastrophe and many Aerangers like Kallelle have travelled far and wide through the cosmos trying to find new planets where her people can settle with no luck. Kallelle seems to have found the right place. Her contact piece seems to be on the verge of giving out so the alien back home tries to reassure Kallelle that her seedling will grow into the filtration system that their people will need thousands of their alien years into the future when eventually they can come out of hibernation and travel to Earth to settle. With this comfort, believing that her actions will benefit her people, the dying Kallelle completes her mission.

The film ends with a very surprising twist and posits the notion that should Kallelle’s people arrive on Earth, they will find that, like them, we are also on the verge of global environmental catastrophe due in no small part to our activities and our failure to act as responsible stewards of our planet’s resources. Whether they decide to wipe us out or deign to share their knowledge and solutions to the environmental crisis is a story for another film but Kallelle’s encounter with the human suggests that her people might regard us as savages who do not deserve to be saved.

The film would not have worked without Breckenridge’s acting: she portrays Kallelle with astonishing insight in an otherwise sketchy character who is at once vulnerable, hesitant and in great pain, yet determined and focused when the need arises. In her final moments, she looks at a picture of a loved one on her hologram gadget with tears in her eyes. The forest environment itself is a significant character, Eden-like in its immersive and serene quality, with a herd of mammoths travelling through the hills in the distance, yet not without its dangers hiding behind its curtains of trees.

With its themes of duty, self-sacrifice and love for one’s family and people, and how such qualities can have consequences extending far into the future, the film has the appearance of a parable.