Brief Review Of The Movie Aniara
First off: SPOILERS. Secondly, even though I just watched this movie last night, I kept typing Ariana instead of Aniara, which is what I think may be a huge error since many people will flub looking for this title.
It’s a hard science fiction movie inlaid with cultural criticism. Let’s ignore for this review how a giant transport ship lacked maneuvering redundancies to ultimately become a ghost ship and focus on the meat of the film. Or why wouldn’t you armor your nuclear reactor engine to be impenetrable, specifically by small items like screws, or have a giant armored umbrella to catch space debris, but anyway, I digress.
For one thing, I personally don’t think the crew and passengers would have despaired as much as they did and become extinct in a quarter of a decade. I think that people in that situation would have come to accept their fate and redesign their lives accordingly. The captain, who knew there was no hope, kept insisting on lying about their situation to provide false hope. The lesson there: false hope is no substitute for real hope. False hope leads to people feeling lied to and betrayed, and this assists in their losing morale and giving up, so in that way it made sense why the passengers gave up. Ultimately, passengers suiciding created negative emotions too powerful to overcome, so much so, even our heroine (who, to be honest, I thought was 10–15 years older than she is) who was strongly optimistic eventually broke down.
It made logical sense for passengers to suicide, after all, their situation was hopeless and why bother live to see the slow death and destruction of your spaceship? However, we see that suicide is the main enemy, since people are needed to keep the ship’s life-support systems going. Too many dropouts and you no longer grow enough food. There were lots of children and people were still giving birth, so younger generations were going to grow up and create newer generations. There were enough people onboard for sustained genetic diversity to prevent severe inbreeding. But the rapid selfish deaths of many led to a quick destruction.
This begs the question since we all live on a spaceship orbiting an energy source, are humans given to self-destruction because of our nihilistic despair? The passengers were unable to create meaning for themselves, and many here on earth are unable to do so as well. We have enough geographic diversity and resources to sustain us as a civilization for a long time, but we are also rapidly plundering and consuming our ship and are often poised on the brink of destruction, whether financial or military. We haven’t seemed to philosophically or spiritually overcome our self-destructive tendencies. And, like the ship Aniara, we too may become derelict after 6 million years.
That leads me to my concluding thoughts I was contemplating after watching this emotionally powerful movie, and that is, can anyone even imagine humans lasting for millions of years? Civilization hasn’t been around for very long but we are already mismanaging the planet. How can we go beyond an industrial society without destroying ourselves and the planet? How will we ever make it to the stars, and could we even hope to create a starship capable of sustaining life for millions of years while enroute to a habitable planet.
And that made me think of the Georgia Guidestones. The tenth point the guidestones make is this: Be not a cancer on the Earth, leave room for nature, leave room for nature. Whoever made the guidestones recognized if we pilfer nature too much, we destroy the life support systems on our spaceship. Or, since the guidestones came out in the last year of the 70s, they were begging future generations to not destroy the planet with nuclear weapons (again?). I tend to believe that the stones are for a post-apocalyptic, post-nuclear WWIII remnant of survivors rather than a satanic cult bent on destruction of the world (which is clearly not the case, the 500 million people question could be anticipating most people dead after a nuclear war, and warning the survivors to regulate reproduction enough to not face population related problems. Remember that the 70s were a big time for overpopulation discussions).
Because the Aniara ultimately resulted in the loss of humanity, one cannot help but dwell on the possible loss of humanity on our own planet. The end of human civilization is a dark subject, and like death itself, is ignored or dismissed (I’ll-deal-with-it-when-it-comes kind of mentality). When I browse the things going on in the news today, I don’t get any impression people are concerned in the slightest about the continued existence and improvement of our race. We do this at our own peril.
