3022 (2019)

A crew on a ten-year hitch manning the space station acting as a waypoint between Earth and a colony on Europa are rapidly falling apart barely five years in, when the option to be recalled to Earth is taken out of the hands. Because there seems to no longer be an Earth to be recalled to.

The movie switches between scenes of the captain (Omar Epps) limping through a dark and empty station, scanning for something out in space, and the past, which gradually reveals how things got to that point. It's a somewhat effective technique, because it gives the audience enough to encourage them to wonder. What happened to the crew doctor? What's Epps scanning for, exactly, and why the hell is he limping?

The movie adds the wrinkle that Epps suffers from night terrors, or something to that effect, because of stress, even before everything goes terribly wrong. The doctor warns him he'll eventually starting hallucinating, which adds an additional bit of mystery to the sequences in the future, as the audience can't be sure whether he truly is alone as he appears. Because he certainly isn't.

Beyond revealing how things got to that point on the station, the flashbacks mostly show how people react to terrible things. Epps tries to carry on with his duties. Not ignoring the issue, just thinking of it as one more thing he must lead the others through. The doctor takes a nihilistic approach, and grows blunt with the others. Except it's revealed as only skin deep once he actually makes the logical choice given that mindset (the one I'd been telling him to hurry up and make for at least 15 minutes by that point.) The, either second-in-command or chief engineer, was never clear on each person's duties, wants to try to get back to Earth, on the chance there's someone still there.

The movie uses a lot of, unpleasant lighting, is how I'd describe it. Dull orange or white lights that make everyone's skin look sallow or sickly. A lot of those shots were the light is almost rising above the curve of the person's skull, so it flares and partially obscures their features. Those in particular seemed counterproductive in a movie that had many stretches of one character or another on their own, where it's down to their expressions and body language to sell it, because there's no one to talk to.