ANOTHER EARTH (USA 2011) *
Directed by Peter Cahill

ANOTHER EARTH has the audience believe that there is a parallel earth that has all the identical beings living the same lives as those on the planet earth.  Writer/director Peter Cahill is also daring enough to display the familiar earth in the sky where his lead characters walk. 

The story has Rhoda Williams (Brit Marling), a physics student at MIT, is driving back from a party when she notices a planet on the horizon. Leaning out her window for a better look, she hits a minivan and kills the family in it. She is imprisoned for four years. Upon her release, she seeks out the widower of the family, composer John Burroughs (William Mapother).

If things are not stranger, the planet she saw is a mirror planet of Earth, seemingly to the extent that it even has the same people on it, and an essay contest is held where the winner can ride a space shuttle to visit it. As the planet moves closer to Earth, Rhoda considers the possibility of visiting it to find out what kind of life her mirror self would have led, while concurrently developing an increasingly intimate relationship with John.  The script has a contest to be won where the winner wins a free trip to this planet. And Rhonda wins the trip!

The script contains many loopholes.  If the two earths are identical, how come the accident part is different.  It seems that Cahill writes whatever he wants to suit his story – what most people call a cop-out.

His imagery and camera work are also weak.  At the start during the car crash, I thought (and so did one other fellow film critic I asked after the screening) that the young woman (Brit Marling) was in the car crash with the man and daughter and not the one that ran into the car.  Only near the end of the film did I realise my misunderstanding.  Cahill makes no attempt to make his characters clear.  Why too, is the other earth suddenly discovered the same time as the car crash?

With sci-fi blending into reality, the film deteriorates into a slip-shod story in which anything can happen for the sake of the writer’s fancy.  In this case, the premise of the guilty entering a family’s privacy for the purpose of redemption has been done often enough in other movies and watching all this again with ANOTHER EARTH is just too much.  I regret not previewing ANOTHER MOVIE that was screened the same time as this one.