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National Geographic
Journey to Europa
Jupiter’s four Galilean moons have always
held something of a fascination for me, if only because they seem like
such a study in contrasts; volcanic furnace-like Io, crystalline Europa,
icy Ganymede, rocky, heavily cratered Callisto.
It was thus with sizable anticipation I
approached the new Madman/National Geographic joint venture Journey
to Europa, presuming, logically enough, that the release would
constitute an insightful documentary on this watery satellite, replete
with history, the story of its discovery and plenty of satellite imagery
to round out the exposition.
Instead the principal focus of this short
feature is the rather strange and seemingly moot question of whether or
not this particular moon could sustain human life. The footage is
mostly CGI, with plenty of enactment of a hypothetical spacecraft
landing on Europa in search of a hypothetical subterranean water supply
capable of sustaining hypothetical human habitation, coupled with
interview footage of ‘preeminent underwater cave explorer and inventor’
Bill Stone whom, we are informed, is ‘developing robots to carry out
that mission one day.’ One of Stone’s underwater vehicles is tested,
and plentiful CGI footage posits how a descendant of the vehicle might
fare on a mission to Europa.
I’m all for deep space exploration and a
solid understanding of the solar system which we inhabit, but this one
was a bit niche even for me. Coupled with a fairly arbitrary premise
was a rather bland presentation and some patently absurd, thoroughly
melodramatic voiceover work, of which the following is just the merest
sample:
‘Europa: an icy world that’s a prime
target in the search for alien life’
‘Travel to the future and search for
life – on an alien moon’
‘In a universe so vast, there are too
many stars to count’
‘The day we find alien life it won’t
matter if it’s intelligent’
etc etc. The facts offered were nothing
that isn’t readily available on Wikipedia, the voiceover artist was so
grave it lent a patently comical air to proceedings and the premise
veered between the redundant and the hypothetical. Not sure who this
one is aimed at; I love science/space/astronomy documentaries in general
and I fucking hated it – whoever commissioned Journey to Europa,
it wasn’t an intelligent life form.
Special Features
In order to plump out the feature’s slender
50-minute runtime Nat Geo have tacked on an additional 50-minute
documentary entitled Space Launch: Along for the Ride which,
interestingly enough, comprises a behind the scenes look at a manned
space launch from the Russian Baikonur Cosmodrome. We meet the three
men who’ll be journeying on the rocket, observe their final days of
training, learn how the spacecraft is assembled and prepared, go inside
Mission Control in Moscow and count down to blast-off with the project’s
flight director and the rest of the aeronautical crew. It’s a
fascinating and truly compelling expose into the inner workings of a
space launch, and so wholly superior to Journey to Europa that
it’s bewildering this excellent doco was relegated to the status of
supplementary feature. At any rate the set essentially constitutes a
double feature, and the excellent, insightful Space Launch more
than compensates for the silliness inherent in the main feature. |
