Director – Leni Lauritsch, Screenplay – Jessica Lind & Leni Lauritsch, Producers – Klaus Graf, Loredana Rehekampff & Andreas Schmied, Photography – Xiaosu Han & Andreas Thalhammer, Music – Daniel Helmer & Wolf-Maximilian Liebich, Visual Effects Supervisor – Franz Brandstaetter, Visual Effects – Arri Media & arx anima animation studio, Special Effects – Erwin Reichel, Production Design – Johannes Mucke. Production Company – Samsara Filmproduktion/Graf Film/Osterreichischen Filminstituts/ORF [Film/Fernseh-Abkhommen]/Filmfonds Wien/Fimstandort Austria/Land Karnten Kultur-Carinthia Film Commission.
Cast
Julia Franz Richter (Commander Hannah Wagner), Mark Ivanir (Dimitri Krylow), George Blagden (Gavin Abbott), Nick Monu (Philipp Janson), Daniela Kong (Tracy Sato), Konstantin Frolov (Danilo Krylow), Hannah Rang (Knopf), Lupo Grujic (Sergio), Jonas Gerzabeck (Little Kropf)
Plot
In the year 2056, the Earth has become vastly polluted. Corporations dominate and people have been moved into air domes away from the contaminated atmosphere outside. Hannah Wagner travels up to take command of the Rubikon space station. Dmitri Krylow has been on the station for eight years and has successfully constructed an algae-based oxygen recycling system. He realises that Hannah is a soldier who has been sent to steal his algae system on behalf of the Nibra Corporation. As they watch, the return shuttle abruptly burns up during re-entry. They then see polluted atmosphere rapidly spreading and covering the Earth, while communication with all the cities below goes dead. Hannah, Dmitri and Gavin Abbott realise they are the only people left alive. Hannah becomes involved with Gavin but with her corporate IUD no longer working, she becomes pregnant. Contact is then established with 300 survivors in one of the air domes. The three are divided about whether they should abandon the safety of the space station and take the algae system down to help those in the dome.
The idea of a group of people in space, in particular aboard a Space Station, who survive devastation on the Earth below them has a certain popularity. The idea has been around since Defcon-4 (1985), which had three people in a space station orbiting Earth surviving a nuclear holocaust below. There was also Love (2011) with a sole astronaut on the International Space Station as contact with Earth goes dead.
More recently, there was 3022 (2019) in which the crew of a space station are the sole survivors after witnessing the destruction of the Earth, while George Clooney’s The Midnight Sky (2020) had a lone scientist trying to communicate with the crew of a returning space mission following an extinction catastrophe on Earth; I.S.S. (2023) was set among the tension between US and Russian on the International Space Station when nuclear war breaks out between the two sides on Earth; and the Chinese Moon Man (2022), a comedy where a sole astronaut is the last person left alive after the destruction of the Earth by an asteroid.
Rubikon is a science-fiction film that bites off a big chunk conceptually. It does a fine job when it comes to the production design depicting the space station – all built on a single interconnected soundstage. There are some good visual effects scenes of the exterior of the station and of Julia Franz Richter on her EVA repair missions.
The survivors aboard the Rubikon – (l to r) Julia Franz Richter, Mark Ivanir and George Blagden
On the other hand, I don’t feel that Rubikon is always successful as a film. For one, it takes an awfully long time to engage dramatically. For quite a length of runtime, it is just about three people on a space station – the end of the world has occurred but nothing much seems to happen between the three of them. It is only in the latter third of the film when they make contact with survivors and there is debate about whether to go down and aid them or not that any drama picks up.
The other question is that the film never exactly clarifies what it is that abruptly turns the Earth uninhabitable. It is suggested that it is some kind of toxic cloud and that this is some kind of Environmental catastrophe. Now, a science-fiction work doesn’t have to explain how things happen – the fact that devices like transporters, warp drives and time machines are scientifically impossible or really, really unlikely doesn’t mean you can’t enjoy the story in which they appear, they can just be like a black box where the inner workings are unknown or operated according to handwave double talk. On the other hand, after setting up a vast world-destroying catastrophe, which works well for dramatic purposes, the script then shrugs its shoulders and reaches an end where for no real reason the cloud just dissipates.
Rubikon was a directorial debut for Austrian director Magdaena ‘Leni’ Lauritsch, who had previously made several short films.
