language-barrier

Gosling carries this, as he often does. He’s the only human on screen for big stretches and never less than watchable, which the film asks a lot of. Rocky is the other triumph: from what I read, it’s roughly half puppetry, half CGI, and the two techniques together give the alien real character. The overall alien design and technology is a fine balance. Any cuter and it’s Flight of the Navigator; any weirder and it’s another Nolan bore-piece (fight me).

Tonally it just about holds. The premise is bleak, and a braver film might have leaned into that for a bigger payoff. Instead it stays small and personal, the resolution focusing on the Grace–Rocky friendship rather than the fate of humanity. Crowd-pleasing, in a specific sense that I didn’t mind.

The received wisdom is that this is Anderson before he became Anderson, but I’m less sure. The Futura, the overhead shots of handwritten plans, the 60s-inflected soundtrack, the lovable failures stumbling through aimless privilege… these are more than mere foundations for what else would come, they’re in many ways the centre of the thing itself. Sure, it needed time to develop, but what isn’t ‘Wes’ here is probably better explained by studio pressure on a debut filmmaker than by any absence of vision.