Director – Choi Hangyong, Teleplay – Pork Eunkyo, Producer – Cho Youngwook, Photography – Yoonseuk Back, Music – Ji-soon Lee, Visual Effects – Anna, Badclay Studio, Bat, Cyclo VFX, 4th Creative Party, Hong, Labyrinth, LooCreative, The May, Moo Media, NetFX Mumbai, Opim Digital, Redefine, Supercore, Thunder Studios, V-1st, VFX Hub, Visual Birds & Wyswyg. Production Company – Artist Studio.
Cast
Bae Doona (Dr Song Ji-an), Gong Joo (Han Joon-yae), Kim Sun-young (Dr Hong Ga-young), Lee Joon (Captain Ryoo Tae-seok), Lee Sung-wook (Kim Hee Sun), Rae-Hyung Cha (E1), Yoo Hee-je (E2), Yoo Seong-ju (Mr Hwang), Kil Hae-yeon (Director Choi), Kim Si-ah (Luna), Kang Mal-Geum (Song Won-kyung), Choi Young-woo (Lee Gi-su)
Plot
In the future, the Earth has undergone drastic climate change leading to water shortages. Dr Song Ji-an is recruited by the Korean Space and Aeronautics Division as part of a mission to go to Balhae Research Station on The Moon. Five years earlier, Ji-an’s sister Won-kyung died among 117 other personnel at Balhae and the station has been closed ever since. Their team are given orders to bring back samples, but details of their mission are kept a secret. Their ship crashes on the lunar surface but they make it safely to the station. They find the base filled with dead bodies. Various of the group then become infected with water from the samples, which contains unknown molecular components that cause the infected person’s body to gush with vast quantities of fluid. Ji-an seeks to find the secrets of what happened at the station, even while being forbidden to investigate by her commanding officer. She encounters a feral child living in the tunnels who holds the secrets to the experiments that were being conducted at the base.
The Silent Sea – not to be confused with the Clive Cussler novel The Silent Sea (2010) – is a South Korean TV Mini-Series. It was released to Netflix in eight episodes of 45 minutes apiece.
The Silent Sea falls into being one of the spate of films and tv series of the late 2010s onwards set around realistic depictions of space and journeys within the solar system that came out following Gravity (2013). (See NASA and the Space Program). The story of astronauts stranded on The Moon draws obvious critical comparisons to The Martian (2015), one of the other big hits of this era.
More so than The Martian, what The Silent Sea resembles is Alien (1979) and one of the numerous copies of it that were made during the 1980s. There is the same sense we get in Alien of a crew of astronauts venturing into an abandoned facility where the original crew have been killed and of something alien and monstrous that proceeds to infect their bodies. Much of the mini-series feels like Alien or one of these Alien copies playing out in slow-motion where all the beats of the script have been drawn out over the eight episodes.
(l to r) Gong Joo and Bae Doona on The Moon
As the plot goes on, The Silent Sea becomes filled with increasingly wilder elements – a strange form of water with added molecules (that seems to gush forth from the mouths of the infected producing far more liquid than could possibly exist in a human body), illicit experiments being conducted and a feral child that has a mysterious immunity to the water in some way. (The mini-series does get a little murky in explaining some of the details).
On the other hand, the mini-series never quite reaches a full satisfactory resolution. The build-up and mimicry of the Alien film leads you to expect for much of the show that there is something alien on the base – indeed, the whole alien-possessed water was used by The Asylum not long after with Battle for Pandora (2022) – but the eventual explanations end up being less fantastical. Somehow water as a resident monster just doesn’t seem to have the scary effect that the mini-series seems to think it does and the end denouement and explanations for what is going on prove somewhat of a let-down.
The Silent Sea comes with an impressive range of visual effects when it comes to depicting the journey to the moon and the lunar surface. (That said, the mini-series abandons the lunar surface for the most part after the first episode once the crew arrive at the base apart from the odd view through the windows). The science nitpicker in me also majorly appreciated the fact that they get the lowered lunar horizons right. This is something most films set on The Moon get wrong – without any atmosphere there is no Rayleigh Scattering, which causes the horizon on Earth to vanish off into the distance and become blurred, whereas with a smaller planetary surface and no atmosphere in between, the horizon on The Moon looks much closer (something you can see in the Apollo photos and tv footage). On the other hand, one cannot help but notice that we get lunar gravity and people seen walking in slow-motion when out on the lunar surface, but this then seems to magically default back to Earth standard once they are inside the base.
