THE TITAN (2018)

Genre: Sci-Fi
Director: Lennart Ruff
Cast: Sam Worthington, Taylor Schilling, Tom Wilkinson, Agyness Deyn, Nathalie Emmanuel, Corey Johnson
Runtime: 1 hr 37 mins
Rating: NC16 (Some Violence and Coarse Language)
Released By: Shaw Organisation
Official Website: 

Opening Day: 5 April 2018

Synopsis: In a near-future where the Earth is on the verge of becoming uninhabitable, former Air Force pilot Rick Janssen (SAM WORTHINGTON) is chosen for a military experiment that will create a human being capable of surviving the harsh environments of Saturn's moon, TITAN. Relocating to an island in the Atlantic Ocean to take part in the secret program, Rick is accompanied by his wife Dr Abigail Janssen (TAYLOR SCHILLING) and their young son Lucas. The Janssen family, however, comes to discover that all is not quite as they'd expected - the program's director, Professor Martin Collingwood (TOM WILKINSON), may be using them to a wholly different and mysterious agenda in his attempts to colonize Titan and further the frontiers of human experience.

Movie Review:

We’re not sure what first-time director Lennart Ruff or his screenwriter Max Hurwitz had intended ‘The Titan’ to be. Was it meant as a cautionary tale on genetic experimentation? Or some philosophical exploration of homo sapien versus homo titanian, i.e. human versus humanoid? Or did they in fact think of it as a variation of its lead star Sam Worthington’s claim to fame ‘Avatar’? Frankly speaking, it could have been any of the above, but by failing to choose and commit to one, this sci-fi thriller is probably one of the most muddled and boring genre entries we’ve seen in a while.

The premise is standard issue: the Earth’s over-population has led to a string of wars, including an unexplained nuclear event that has left Los Angeles uninhabitable, and our best hope for the future of mankind is the largest of Saturn’s moons named Titan. Apparently, Titan is the only object in the solar system with a dense atmosphere that can potentially accommodate humans, but in order to do so, we’d have to start learning how to breathe nitrogen instead of oxygen. As such, the morally suspect Professor Martin Collingwood (Tom Wilkinson) has been given the authority to conduct an elaborate genetic editing experiment at a large seaside NATO base in the Canary Islands – instead of ‘trying to shape climate in our image’, he says, we are going to ‘evolve humanity into the stars’.

Worthington’s former Air Force pilot Rick Janssen is one such promising candidate chosen for the mission, and when we first meet him, he is on his way with his wife Abigail (Taylor Schilling) and young son to their new state-of-the-art coastal residence within the army base. Despite its intergalactic premise, most of the movie takes place within the base itself, as Rick and his fellow lab rats are subject to a whole lot of trials and tests. Some of these are mildly interesting – such as when Rick acquires the ability to breathe underwater for more than 30 minutes or swim with the speed and agility of a dolphin – but the first half of the movie is largely a drag that does little both plot and character-wise. In particular, there is not much to chew on about Rick and his family, nor for that matter between Rick and the other people selected for the project, and it is telling that we do not even identify with his fellow servicemen on the level of caricature.

Things only pick up towards the last act when these experiments go wrong – a candidate convulses on the ground and chokes on her own blood; another couple of them kill their spouses within their homes in acts of steroidal rage; and in Rick’s case, losing his eyesight and spouting gills. While it may seem that the film wants to make a point about “playing God”, it never does so emphatically enough; instead, it leans on Abigail to portray the emotional devastation of a beloved wife watching her husband grow increasingly less human. By the time Rick completes his physical transformation into a homo titanian (and turns out resembling a cousin of Joel Edgerton’s orc in ‘Bright’), it is all too clear that the movie intends to go out as a creature horror, thus culminating in the sort of human-versus-alien showdown which is the fate of countless other eugenics-themed sci-fi thrillers.

It isn’t so much that the movie is predictable as the fact that it is simply tedious and even frustrating, never quite settling on what it wants to say or be about. It spends far too long biding its time, and then seems to want to impress on the ethical conundrum of genetic experimentation while contemplating on the relationship between body and identity, but hardly builds itself to anything compelling either way. Worse still, it has an unfortunately bland lead in Worthington, who makes it even more plainly clear how thinly written his character is. Oh yes, the bigger fault is with the script itself, which abruptly shifts its focus from Rick to Abigail somewhere in the middle, in the hope of getting us to care about someone in the movie itself.

To its credit, ‘The Titan’ has avoided taking the B-movie approach as is evident in its restraint on straightforward action and gore. But its visual elegance is hardly worth sitting through if not backed with a strong narrative and sharp thematic focus, both of which are sorely absent. Everything feels muted from start to finish, so much so that by the time the movie makes us sit up with its few brief shots of Rick on the titular moon soaring through its skies with his evolved wings, it is just about time to get up and leave the theatre. In fact, its title seems utterly ironic given how modest and downright diminutive the movie is, and it is no wonder that it has taken two years (as well as a Netflix save in many territories) for it to finally see the light of day. Still, there is barely reason why you should even care, or bother, about this terribly unexciting film that is really little ado about nothing at all.

Movie Rating:

(By not knowing what it wants to be about or what it wants to say, this visually appealing but narratively and thematically empty sci-fi only ends up boring and uninvolving)

Review by Gabriel Chong