Director/ Screenplay/Photography/Production Design – William Eubank, Producers – Dan Figur, Nate Kolbeck & Vertel Scott, Music – Angels & Airwaves, Visual Effects Supervisor – Paul Griffin, Visual Effects – Bentlight Digital, Five VFX (Supervisor – Bruce Turner), Griffin Interplanetary Studios & Zoic Studios (Supervisor – Paul Ghezzo), Special Effects Supervisor – Frankie Indica. Production Company – Angels & Airwaves.
Cast
Gunner Wright (Captain Lee Miller), Corey Richardson (General McClain), Bradly Horne (Captain Lee Briggs)
Plot
The year 2039. Captain Lee Miller is a lone astronaut stationed aboard the International Space Station. During his downtime, he reads the journals of Captain Lee Briggs, a soldier during the American Civil War. Abruptly, contact with Earth goes dead and Miller is left alone aboard the space station.
Love was the first film for William Eubank who has since gone on to become a director of some note with original and modestly effective works such as The Signal (2014), Underwater (2020) and Paranormal Activity: Next of Kin (2021).
Love has an interesting genesis. Prior to making the film, William Eubank was working at Panavision and had some credits as a cinematographer. Eubank then began to work with the space rock band Angels & Airwaves, directing several music videos for them. The band commissioned Eubank to make a feature film for which they also composed the score (released as three albums). Wikipedia cites the film’s budget as $500,000 (although that does seem a little on the high side), especially considering the way the film was made – where Eubank constructed the sets for the International Space Station in his parent’s backyard and shot the film over a four year period.
Love came out just before Gravity (2013) created a huge upsurge in films about NASA and the Space Program. Love is one of several films that predate and seem to anticipate Gravity, alongside the likes of Astronaut: The Last Push (2012) and Europa Report (2013). These were films conducted on much lesser budgets, particularly in the effects department.
William Eubank does some ingenious things in his depiction of a space station interior (even if it is absent of any zero gravity) and there are some okay external effects shots. The major problem that the film has is the title Love, which seems the least suggestive of a space film possible (although the final line of the film does make sense of this).
Astronaut Gunner Wright on his transcendental journey
The theme of the lone astronaut or astronauts aboard a space mission finding they are all alone after something happens on Earth is a familiar one that has turned up in a number of films before and since – see the likes of Defcon 4 (1985), Approaching the Unknown (2016), 3022 (2019), The Midnight Sky (2020), Moon Man (2022), Rubikon (2022) and I.S.S. (2023). Indeed, around the same time a very similar plot features in Astronaut: The Last Push – both films consist of a single astronaut aboard a space mission and chart his struggle to keep sane, stay in touch with home etc. Although in contrast to these other films, the details of what happened back on Earth here are kept very vague.
Both here and in Astronaut: The Last Push, this can make for a slow, uneventful film as there is not much drama watching a single character on screen reacting to life while in a confined space. On the other hand, William Eubank adopts an almost Terrence Malick-ian style where the character’s voiceover comes in a series of often poetic fragments and memories. This is interspersed with scenes where Gunner Wright reads from an American Civil War journal. Indeed, you wonder whether you are watching the wrong film when the show opens on a battlefield scene as depicted the journal (where Eubank has obtained the services of a group of Civil War reenactors), which leads to a vivid slow-motion scene as the soldiers go into battle.
On the other hand, the film loses itself when it tries to end on a Transcendental Journey a la 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968). Here Gunner Wright is contacted by something ‘other’, presumably an alien intelligence, amid glowing lights, all produced on a low-budget. There are some occasionally evocative scenes of Gunner wandering around a deserted train station, a hotel and a room of computer banks in his space suit, which recall something of the hotel room scenes in 2001. The film goes out on Gunner’s realisation of the need for ‘love’.
