Last Flight review: Solaris-style sci-fi takes a turbulent stellar body from Earth

yThis ambitious French science fiction tale contains some quiet moments of beauty and emotion, but it’s a work so long, exhilarating, gentle, and ill-thought-out that it feels much longer than its 87-minute running time suggests. In writer and director Roman Quiro’s vision of the future, humanity has figured out how to extract an inexhaustible source of energy from an astral body that has been wandering past; It is called, without imagination, the “red moon”. This celestial body resembles the living, conscious planet in Stanislav Lim Solaris’s novel (a book that has been modified twice by Andrei Tarkovsky and Steven Soderbergh), and our hero Paul W.R. (Hugo Becker) can somehow sense the moon. . Earthlings are with us for a reason.

This seems to be the reason for his refusal to fly on a mission to destroy the approaching lunar body, even though, in a frankly ridiculous plot, he is the only person in the world who can do so. Moreover, the scenario is ambiguous about whether the Earth has turned into a huge desert similar to Morocco. because Red Moon or simply because of the climatic melt that we already know. Principal director Quiro is clearly more interested in highlighting the dysfunctional family dynamic that Paul grew up in: a mother who died when he was young, and the father of a distracted scientific genius (Jean Reno, missing here). There is also an older brother named Elliot (Paul Hammey) who uses his psychic powers to convince people to kill themselves.

Instead of the big task, Paul goes on the run in search of a mysterious forest for no apparent reason. He joins a sweet little girl (Lea Osadate Lessert) he meets at a break as he tries to get a new battery for his hovering electric car. As you can see, these cars are supposed to float above the ground thanks to a mysterious energy source harvested from the red moon. It looks good in wide VFX shots, but Quirot never explains why it wobbles while driving, like any old four-wheeled car. The lack of attention to detail is what feels like a victory for style over content, and not in a good way.