Most of Magellan (2017) concentrates on the personality of astronaut Roger Nelson. When the radio telescope at Arecibo detects not one, nor two, but three radio transmissions locations of extra-terrestrial origin on the moons Titan (of Saturn) and Triton (of Neptune), along with the small planet Eris (very roughly out around the same orbit as Pluto), NASA selects Roger Nelson as the best fit as the human component of a probe to investigate these phenomena (sadly, they don’t go into deep detail as to why he’s the best, which would have been interesting for the science geeks out there).
This movie isn’t interested in easy answers. Using stasis to keep Nelson from going stale over the few years it’ll take to make it to the three targets, Nelson must struggle with his ship, the possibly-compromised Artificial Intelligence (AI) who runs the mission while he sleeps, the perky AI pilot of the lander, and, most sadly, his wife, who, despite her own scientific training and participation in Mission Control, has a very hard time losing her husband for a decade.
Nelson is successful in retrieving the artifacts, but, in perhaps the most realistic part of the story, the answers they provide lead to far larger and more important questions, not only of scientific and exo-political nature, but of a personal nature as well. When a fourth radio source comes online, possibly in response to Nelson’s examination of the first three alien transmitters, that source is out in the Oort cloud, the “cloud” of comets which circle the Sun nearly a light-year out. There is no magically quick way for Nelson to reach this target: it’s a 38 year trip with his technology, and Earth has no new technologies to help him.
Nor does the story let him summon that source to him. That leaves him with the simple, disturbing question – will he abandon his wife to pursue one of the most important discoveries ever made, or will he return to Earth?
We just stumbled into this movie and found it quite gripping. Not that there aren’t areas that couldn’t have used more work, but, for a movie which concentrates on just the single character, it’s rather well done. In the same class as The Martian (2015), Magellan may have not been quite so tense, but it asks deeper questions than did The Martian.
It’s not quite recommended, but it’s worth a watch if you’re a science fiction fan. But, if you are, you’ve probably already seen it.
