Lindsay Harris and Stuart Leach, “Unearthed” (2011)
On the edge of the known universe, a mining spacecraft The Ezekiel discovers an uncharted barren planet that may contain a valuable fuel resource. The crew, Mitch and Cadman, are directed to go to the planet and take samples for analysis. While drilling, the men hit an underground air pocket and fall through the ground into a deep cave. Mitch is injured and Cadman calls for a rescue team. While they wait, Cadman starts exploring the labyrinthine passages of the cave (as you do when you’re stranded on an alien planet and your companion is lying near death) and finds some extraordinary objects: twisted metal, a familiar-looking ladder structure and, er … eggs in a floor. (Yikes!) Cadman picks up one egg and turns it over: it’s a human skull, of all things …
The film plods quite a bit and has a very dark look throughout which adds to the stealthily rising tension. One guesses that the barren planet on which The Ezekiel lands might be a familiar one, especially when one sees shadows of familiar metal structures. The gag is that because Mitch and Cadman are clad in space-suits and are never seen in close-up facing the camera until the very end, audiences assume they’re human. Only when Cadman holds up the skull and turns to the camera do we see his face. At this point, audiences have to speculate on how Mitch and Cadman came to be so called, how they speak to each other and with the rest of The Ezekiel crew in American accents. The principle of Occam’s Razor suggests that a scenario akin to Pierre Boulle’s novel “Planet of the Apes” and the films based on it might have taken place; or that while Mitch and Cadman have been gone for what they think has only been a few years, their home planet has whizzed through a hundred thousand years.
The animation looks incredibly realistic and the characters move and speak convincingly as humans. The explorers joke and grizzle about their employment and Mitch even says he wants his fair share if Cadman discovers a rich mineral or energy deposit. True, some images aren’t original – Stanley Kubrick’s “2001: A Space Odyssey” is one major inspiration for the short – and the film-makers must have had plenty of laughs at viewers’ expense with their Alien-meets-Planet-of-the-Apes plot. The characters are as developed as needed for the film short so they strike this viewer as rather stereotyped space miners doing one last job before going on extended holiday leave and talking about hitting the jackpot or whining about working conditions or their boss. The music can be overbearing for a film of its length (just over 22 minutes) and is nothing special to talk about: it’s the usual orchestral space-opera music soundtrack. That Kubrick film sure has a lot to answer for.
Still, the film-makers know how to draw maximum suspense from a story, throw in manipulative little ploys like Cadman shining his torch over a sheer cliff (so that viewers wonder whether he too will take a fall as Mitch did) and include a twist element that changes viewers’ expectations of the entire story and its characters. For this reason, the film doesn’t bear watching more than once or maybe twice: once you see the climax (if you last that long), then the story loses the elements of surprise and mystery.
Now if Harris and Leach can hire a script-writer with really original ideas on space exploration as opposed to cutting up and pasting together story-lines from past Hollywood movies, they could really go places in the universe …