Settlers

2021, Wyatt Rockefeller (short Entropy) -- download

This was the second of two indie scifi movies I downloaded some months ago, that lingered in my Plex queue until I took a Saturday morning opportunity to watch. The first was Tides, which I rather enjoyed, but still considered it just a smidge above middling. I am tough to impress these days, and even when I am enjoying something, I can still consider it objectively. Settlers was just below middling, in that I enjoyed some elements of it, but overall I wished it would have strived for more.

Wow, what a wishy washy paragraph, which I would say is significantly below middling.

So, the movie takes place on ... Mars? They never really say out loud. But dry, rocky & dusty and you can see Earth in the clear night sky. Reza (Jonny Lee Miller, Hackers), his young daughter Remmy (Brooklyn Prince, The Florida Project) and his wife Ilsa (Sofia Boutella, Star Trek Beyond) live in one of those colonist structures you see in all the movies - single story modular structures surrounded by plastic sheeting green houses and other technological structures. Again like most of these movies, it all looks shot in an abandoned quarry. They seem happy, but nervous. The brief mention of Earth relays to us that it is dying, again as in most of these movies. We get the feeling they were fleeing something.

Just once I would like to see someone break the colony mould and maybe have unique structures, like Uncle Owen's below ground, round house in Star Wars.

Soon after introductions, they awaken to the word LEAVE scrawled on the outside of the house main window. The farm is quickly attacked by three unknowns. Dad kills two, and sets out to find & kill the third. We hear a single distant gunshot; he doesn't come back. But the assailant does. Jerry (Ismael Cruz Cordova, Ray Donovan) is a soldier from an unknown war, claiming all the other Martian cities have fallen, all the other communities are gone, and he is returning to his parents homestead. He doesn't care what happened to them, or that Reza killed his friends, just that this will be his home once again. He offers Ilsa a challenge. Give him 30 days and he will offer her a gun; if she still wants to kill him, she can.

The mood and style and setting are all classic western. You can easily transplant many of the visuals to dry, dusty grasslands, with a single mooing cow in the background and a lone, haggard Union soldier returning from the Civil War. Many of the quiet, contemplative scenes are as stark and lonely as any frontier, Old West movie would depict. The limited choices that Isla and Remmy have are similar as well.

Once the thirty days have passed, Jerry learns exactly how much Ilsa loved Reza. The first two acts of the movie are over, leaving an older, teenage Remmy (Nell Tiger Free, Game of Thrones) still living with Jerry, many years since the deaths of her father and mother. They only have each other. And Steve, the boxy robot, whom we really don't get his purpose for existing, but that he shoots rounds into the stony soil, cracking it. And that he is semi-sentient. The life between Remmy and Jerry is obviously tense, and she has never truly warmed to him. And then the movie took an expected, but entirely unnecessary turn.

We would think that the days where rape as a plot motivator are gone. I hate to say it, but the typical screenwriter seems stuck in plot points that are not tropes, but just lazy choices because they are familiar ground. That Jerry has been alone for so long, with a teenage girl in front of him, we don't get a story about a challenging man who raised a young girl into an adult, despite their unforgiveable differences. Nope, we get a desperate man desperate for a woman. Sure, there is a hint of "last living man on the planet" vibe, but still... eww, they didn't have to go all rapey. Luckily Steve steps in.

Given the intentional choice to be comparable to a western, I get that much of the world building was left out. But I still wondered. Why were they fleeing Earth? Why hide out on this distant farmstead? Surely there were other homesteaders out there, and why didn't any show up? Of note, the homestead was all under a dome, one of those cliche, Martian domes entered through a tunnel, but what else was out there? And why were the Martians now killing themselves. Remmy survives, and wonders pretty much the same thing. And then makes moves to find her answers, given she has nothing else left but her protector Steve.