USA. 2017.
Crew
Directors – Riyaana Hartley & Vincent Tran, Screenplay – Katherine Tomlinson, Based on the Story by Vincent Tran, Producer – Sunny Vachher, Photography – Danit Sigler, Music – Isabelle Engman & Gerardo Garcia Jr., Makeup Effects – Brittney Victoria, Production Design – Lauren Stewart. Production Company – Sonny Days Features/Love Entertainment/Hollywood Casting and Film Studios.
Cast
Pooja Batra (Kathryn Voss), Gene Farber (John Voss), Michael Keeley (Agent Wyatt Roberts), Ava Cantrell (Amelia Voss), Jamie Ann Burke (Namusisi Niira), Chaim Dunbar (Elvis Price Johnson), Clint Jung (Captain Robert Liu), Michael Sart (Lucia Gas Pascal), Rich Paul (Agent Eli Pope)
Plot
The year 2020. Kathryn Voss makes the tough choice to leave her dying daughter Amelia and depart aboard The Samsara Mission, the first manned expedition to Mars. Three years later, the mission is about to return when something happens and the ship is destroyed. Kathryn is found in the Nevada Desert, the only survivor. She is placed in a facility as government agents study her. Determined to get back to her daughter, Kathryn realises that the government intend that she never leave. However, she also realises that the experience has left her changed. Making an escape, she tries to head back home as she begins to start understanding the changes that have occurred.
The late 2010s saw an upsurge in films about realistic space travel following the successes of Gravity (2013) and The Martian (2015). This trend included the likes of Approaching the Unknown (2016), Life (2017), The Space Between Us (2017), Ad Astra (2019), The Midnight Sky (2020), I.S.S. (2023) and on tv screens The Expanse (2015-22), The First (2018) and Away (2020), among others. (For a more detailed listing see Films Depicting NASA and the Space Program).
One Under the Sun was the strangest among these. You could easily make the assumption that it was another work about the launch of a Mars mission – one was in particular reminded of the tv series Away, which dealt with the onboard dramatics among the astronauts during such a mission. We have a similar mission here, which the film, like Away, goes to painstaking lengths to depict as being an internationally varied mission.
Certainly, One Under the Sun looks very much like a B-budget attempt to depict a space mission with whatever resources the filmmakers had to hand. We never go out on the surface of Mars, for instance. The NASA quarantine facility where Pooja Batra is imprisoned is simply a regular room with cement floor and cinder block walls. On the plus side, there are one or two decent shots of spaceships in transit.
However, from about the point that Pooja Batra escapes from confinement, things head off at a weird tangent. Here the film seems more interested in becoming a mystical, spiritual journey. Pooja has been touched by her journey to Mars in some manner – although at one point, the film confusingly suggests that they didn’t even go to Mars at all. Instead the film is all about her efforts to return home and how she imparts some of the mystical insight she now has to the people she encounters. All along the way, her other crewmates turn up as Imaginary (?) Companions to give her advice and insight. It is a very strange little film.
One Under the Sun was the first film from Vincent Tran and Riyaana Hartley, who together form Love Entertainment. Tran had previously co-directed the autobiographical B-Boy Movie (2010) and the Batman fan film Batgirl Rises (2015), both long short films. They subsequently went on to make the documentary Beyond Driven (2020).
Trailer here