The Australian drama “Space/Time” is about a team of scientists who try to perfect interstellar travel so that humanity can abandon the planet it has ruined and start over elsewhere in the galaxy. After botching the first try and losing their funding, they start over again three years later, off-grid and illegally. But it’s mainly about its own filmmaking virtuosity, which is impossible to deny.
Shot in 2016 by Michael O’Halloran and his writing partner, Adam Harmer, but only now receiving a commercial release, “Space/Time” was cobbled together from the filmmakers’ savings, a bank loan, various investors, and funds from the Australian government. Most of it was shot in a warehouse that stands in for the research facility and, one assumes, a lot of other locations. The end product is a movie in the spirit of one of those small animals that can puff itself up to look bigger and more formidable than it is.
The tale begins with a fragment of the group’s failed first attempt to open a wormhole in space, at a laboratory on the remote Rice Island. Then it jumps ahead three years to the conclusion of an investigation into the disaster and follows its heroine, Liv (Ashlee Lollback), as she’s pulled into a secret, unsanctioned redo, funded by a French technology mogul named Renault (Haroon Jafarey-Hall). The opening introduced characters that would become the most important people in Liv’s life: a government agent named Harris (Pacharo Mzembe) that she ends up marrying, and the visionary driving the first mission, Holt (Hugh Parker), who ends up missing and presumed dead after the explosion that his mania helped cause. The time jump finds a mostly sidelined Harris as a gender-flipped answer to the devoted but worried stay-at-home wife/girlfriend of the questing hero, and Holt luring Liz onto his new team, then trying to convince her to do things her ethical compass won’t permit.
Indeed, if “Space/Time” inspires post-screening debates, it probably won’t be about what happened in the story or what it might “mean” in some larger sense, but whether this little movie filled with huge flexes adds up to more than a glorified demo reel for a cast and crew that approaches the material as if they were making one of the massive, mass audience-targeted blockbusters of the ’80s and ’90s that surely inspired it, “Stargate” and “Contact” most of all.
There are nods towards “harder” science fiction, both on the page and on screen, that delve more deeply into scientific, philosophical, and spiritual concepts. But they rarely amount to more than notions. There are some belatedly promising moments in the climax, especially Holt making a compelling case for humanity walking away from the husk of a planet that it treated like a toilet for thousands of years and starting over with a clean slate; he almost sounds like Don Draper on “Mad Men” telling a colleague who made a terrible mistake, “This never happened. It will shock you how much this never happened.”
It’s always risky for a movie to put sense in the mouth of a bad-guy-coded character, because it risks exposing the movie’s official moral/ethical position as one the filmmakers agree with intellectually but aren’t enthused about, because it’s not as much fun as the alternative. “Space/Time” never topples over into that abyss mainly because of the ferocity of Lollback’s performance. Although she’s a fit, conventionally beautiful woman whose body has been lit and filmed like a Roman sculpture, she hasn’t been given much to work with at a character-building level, except “She’s smart and good, and she’s the hero.”
As a result, she’s constantly at risk of being overwhelmed by Parker, who’s got the juicier role and is great at making you wonder how much of Holt’s cooly messianic fervor is a way of channeling an unexamined death drive. But Lollback’s laser-focused simplicity keeps us in the heroine’s corner, feeling properly horrified and torn by the conundrums that Liv is presented with.
Still, the movie is temperamentally attuned to the Hollywood studio version of idea-driven science fiction, which is essentially an action flick with futuristic sets and a bunch of jargon that has to be awkwardly explained to the viewers. O’Halloran and Harmer’s script is the weak link in the creative chain, getting its points across with technical manual-style explanations and cringeworthy exposition. (When Harris describes the French mogul as “odd,” Liv cheerfully replies, “Yeah, well, do you know any reclusive billionaire industrialists who aren’t?”)
“Space/Time” is careful never to turn the aesthetic dial all the way to the Art Cinema setting. It mainly focuses on the clash of wills between Liv and Hugh and on preparations for the extended fight to the death that powers the film’s finale, in which key moments from unsuccessful prior attempts to activate the wormhole are laid out around the combatants like dioramas in a museum of failure.
The film clearly has a lot on its mind. But by the end, you still might not know what it was, even though the hurtling camerawork, jagged edits, brutal physical confrontations, and bone-rattling sound design will send you home feeling like you’ve had an experience.
