When Superman met Tang Lun, Superman lost. Tang Lun declared him to be most tasty.
Beyond White Space (2018), for all of its apparent renewal of the Moby Dick theme, is really a story about betrayals – a confusing tale of both conscious and unconscious betrayal, of one’s friends and family.
And, ultimately, self.
The Essex is a fishing boat, a spacegoing vessel that hunts clickers, a form of outer space wildlife that is small, valuable, and dangerous. The Essex’s captain is one Richard Bentley, whose father was also a fishing boat captain who went after Tang Lun. Tang Lun is the largest of what appear to be space dragons, visually similar to Chinese dragons, but are considered space whales, rare, immensely valuable, difficult to catch and/or kill, and horrifically dangerous.
And that’s not all the dangers of space. There are space pirates, who track the fishing vessels and relieve them of their valuable cargoes. They are known as boomers, one of a small collection of jabs at current culture. Just as the boomer generation of today are often regarded with distaste by younger generations for their self-absorption, their pollution, and other dubious characteristics, so are these pirates distasteful – violent, grasping, and definitely takers, not makers.
The interactions of at least half the crew of the Essex are filled with deceit, even if mistaken, from the Chinese gang who, in the midst of a deal predicated upon the honor of the captain’s dead father, attempt to kill the captain when they detect a government agent nearby, to said government agent, whose very act of sending a message attracts pirates, from the engineer whose infection, much like toxoplasmosis, drives him to madness and murder in the midst of the whale hunt, to the crewman who seems to use betrayal as a way of life, whether it’s sleeping with other women or quietly planning to escape from the Essex with pregnant girlfriend and ship’s cook Batali as it plunges along in the wake of Tang Lun.
Even Captain Bentley’s guilty of betrayal – of his crew and of himself, in his reckless pursuit of Tang Lun in his little ship. This is brought into sharp relief when his brother Owen, a crew member who is the rare exception to the rule that everyone betrays someone, dies trying to accomplish the task of his brother.
The portrayal of this story is in the gritty-grimy tradition of science fiction, it’ll make you wish you could take a shower afterwards. This contributes to the realism of the tale, but there’s a fundamental problem that no amount of grime is going to fix, and that’s the overly complex nature of the story. At its climax, I count at least three different betrayals going on, along with a space whale taking the diminutive, and fast diminishing, Essex apart.
Despite the efforts of a talented cast and crew, it’s just too much.
The script needs to be redrafted with an eye towards theme clarification and either reduction of the number of moving parts, or a stronger thematic connection between those moving parts. The story of Moby Dick was strongly about vengeance on the white whale, and how that sank the putative venture of harvesting whales and wasted lives; vengeance on Tang Lun may be the motivating factor in this story, but why, for instance, the engineer goes mad from an infection is not in the least clear, and it appears to be little more than a random occurrence. Was it because he was pushed beyond endurance? Was the infection a result of the pursuit? Maybe I missed something?
And it’s too bad, as there are a lot of quality parts to this production. I liked the special effects, the acting, the characters, some of the theme, even the veiled shots at today’s culture. But the script, the element that ties together all of the parts, failed. It all became a nebulaic fog that the Essex sails into.
And never sails out of.
