Another Earth’ is a confused mashup

I’ve given “Another Earth” some more thought (see post below), and here is what I’ve come up with:

We live in an era of the mashup, a term typically used to describe musical tracks that are combined in a way to make something new — or seemingly so. In terms of movies, the most popular kinds of mashups are those in which trailers or sequences from whole films are combined with a new soundtrack (or subtitles) or music to effect a completely new experience.

One of the most popular in the last year or so involves the various mashups that have been constructed around the 2004 movie “Downfall,” some of which are hilarious examples of Adolf Hitler bemoaning, among other things, Boise State’s loss last season to Nevada-Reno.

Mashup is a terms that can also apply to films that attempt to mix genres. Or styles. Or even ideas. “Cowboys & Aliens,” for example, is a mashup. And so is “Another Earth.”

That latter one has been playing at the Magic Lantern. And it has various things to recomend it. Director Mike Cahill, co-writer with actress Brit Marling , uses a kind of washed-out cinematography that tells you right away that this is an independent production. He gets fairly decent peformance out of his main actors, Marling and William Mapothe r. And the movie itself has separate parts that each has its own particular kind of fascination.

Those parts are: 1, the story of a young woman who, having done a terrible, unforgivable thing, tries to redeem herself so that she can find a reason to continue living; 2, the story of a young woman who, desperate to find a way out of an untenable existence, seeks to travel to a mirror image of Earth that shows up one day, suddenly and unaccountably, clearly visible in the sky overhead.

Now, one of these stories is a normal kind of movie script. The other clearly is a genre film, one that depends on some fairly imaginative — is not particularly realistic — twists on physical laws. Together, they achieve a kind of thematic/stylistic mashup that seems to be more and more typical of independent film.

I have no problem with the idea of this. Trouble is, the story here begins to break down about halfway through, with questions posed but never answered, and plot points built upon coincidences or improbabilities that leave you scratching your head. And the final scene, if a bit of a shocker, is still notable more for its surprise factor than for any real sense of … well, satisfaction.

So, yeah, mashups are popular. Trouble is, Cahill and Marling would have been better served to drop one subplot or the other and simply concentrate on telling a coherent story. Say, for example, how it came to be that a giant second Earth just one day flies into view — and what that fact means, specifically, for a young woman who needs some answers as desperately as the audience watching her does.

Below : The trailer of “Another Earth.”