A Million Days (2023)
Out now digitally from Signature
Mitch Jenkins directed The Show – and related shorts – from Alan Moore scripts. Here, he’s still working on a large cosmic canvas, in space and time, from a screenplay by Michael Dobbin and Guillaume Fradin but — after a prologue involving the death of an astronaut on a 2041 moon mission which is a precursor to a lunar colony and the spreading of humanity beyond a possibly doomed Earth — this all takes place in an isolated modernist house in Wales on the eve of a crucial launch in the Seed programme.
Commander Anderson Reigel (Simon Merrells) is eager to get into space again, though he’s still traumatised by the loss of the love of his life in that accident – which he blames on disappeared, embittered astronaut Gene (Darrell D’Silva). His wife Sam (Kemi-Bo Jacobs), conscious that she’s not quite replaced the dead woman in his affections, has created an AI called Jay (and referred to with she/her pronouns) which has a huge influence over the project. The couple’s last evening together on Earth before blast-off goes awry when a much-loved dog goes missing and Sam’s colleague Charlie (Hermione Corfield) – dressed to impress since she has a social event later – shows up with a ton of print-out from Jay and a few nagging questions which disrupt first everyone’s plans for the evening, then the mission, then the future of life in the universe. Jay does what rogue AIs always do and apparently exceeds her programming – the crucial glitch, last seen in the ill-advised Day the Earth Stood Still remake, is that the preservation of life isn’t specified to mean the preservation of humanity.
A 3D printer delivers handy items like a reproduction of the dead woman’s controversial space helmet faceplate and a ton of flimsy documents pinned to a fish-tank which serves as a lightbox, but also a ball of black goo with possibly sinister purpose. Gene shambles in to pick away at what Anderson thinks he knows about the project and where it’s gone wrong or possibly right but in a bad news way … while Sam and Charlie go through reams of projections (a million days’ worth) while beginning to suspect Jay has been deliberately overloading them with information nobody could sift through in order to conceal actions they’d rather she hadn’t taken. Yes, it’s talky – but the talk is mostly good, and characters are interestingly nuanced … with Corfield, in particular, making something of a role which could boil down to standing there looking pretty while relaying science lectures in digestible form. Though forward-looking, it’s a kind of science fiction which looks back to the unfashionable likes of Arthur C. Clarke or Fred Hoyle for its subject matter.
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