Into the Night is a polyglot six-program series that seems to be from no particular place -- it exemplifies up-to-the-moment trends in production that make it extremely difficult to define where a film was made and its origins. Many programs of this sort, particularly on Netflix, seem to come out of nowhere and have a vaguely internationalist ambience. The caption for the show on Netflix says that the program is a Belgian TV-show -- in fact,the picture seems to be a Russian production, apparently shot in someplace called North Macedonia. Except for the actors, the technical cast and crew all have Russian names. But the show seems to have been written by an American or Englishman (John Gibson) and it is based on a novel called The Old Axolotl written by a Polish author. (The show is sort of dubbed, but many of the characters speak in languages are subtitled -- for instance, Russian is subtitled).
The premise of the movie is simple and gripping. A plane flying from Belgium to Moscow is hijacked (before all passengers can get on board) by a crazed Italian solider, Terenzio. This man knows, as a result of attending a NATO conference, that something has gone badly wrong with the sun. Rays of sunlight are lethal due to some sort of radiation. This radiation microwaves people and, further, scrambles molecules so that food becomes tasteless and gasoline or jet fuel is no longer efficacious. Terenzio forces the pilot of the Moscow-bound jet to fly westward with the night. So long as the plane can avoid the dawn, it's passengers will survive. Any exposure to sun beams is immediately lethal. Into the Night uses a structure that David Bordwell has characterized as a "moving spotlight" -- each episode highlights one character, showing a little bit of that person's backstory before he or she entered the fatal jet. The cast of characters is exotic: there is a fierce Russian Roman with a sick child scheduled for surgery in Moscow, Rik, a man heading to Russia to meet his mail order bride (he's a pious Christian), an African, a Black hosptal nurse, a Turk who is part of a conspiracy to smuggle emeralds stolen previously from Turkey back to his homeland -- Matthieu, a Belgian is the pilot (he is involved in an affair with stewardess who is pregnant with his child). A plucky woman soldier, grieving the sudden death of her fiancee (she's carrying an urn with his ashes) has skills as a helicopter pilot and she can, with assistance, fly the jet if necessary. (Terenzio, the highjacker, has shot Matthieu in the hand and injured him so that he can't fly the plane on his own.) Each episode is about 40 minutes long and they are all structured by a "ticking clock" plot -- complicated tasks must be accomplished before the sun rises or everyone will die. The film is very suspenseful, even to the extent that I thought that it was somewhat unpleasant and nerve-wracking to watch. The acting is good and the characters are appropriately frenzied and desperate given the situation in which they find themselves -- normally, a show like this will pause for a romantic subplot, but the stakes here are too high and everyone is constantly engaged in frenetic action. The plane has to be flown at a latitude sufficiently north to stay ahead of the sun -- at the equator, the earth rotation overwhelms the plane's speed and the sun would catch up to them. The protagonists bicker incessantly, threaten one another, and are constantly fighting violently about strategy and tactics. There are all sorts of complications: Matthieu requires surgery (fortunately there's a Black nurse on board who can manage this), the little boy's health is fragile, Terenzio is capricious and violent, clashing repeatedly and violently with the Turkish smuggler -- they try to kill each other on various occasions. It turns out that water filters out the deadly sunrays and so the last several episodes involve the characters flying around the world and, then, landing in Bulgaria (of all places) where there is a reservoir impounded above a bunker where NATO soldiers are holed-up. The refugee's last encounter with troops on the ground wasn't promising -- they picked up three hitchhikers at some air base in Northern Scotland who turned out to be war criminals from Afghanistan and who tried to commandeer the plane until they were abandoned to their doom(with the pregnant stewardess) in the town next to the air base. (One of these bad guys got into the wheel-well of the jet, stowing away and causing a host of problems before he was killed).
The show is conspicuously low-budget, shot mostly in the set of the plane and its cockpit. Images of the plane in the air are simply recycled, including an ominous image of the plane's shadow flying over a well-lit city that may be on fire. The whole show takes place in oppressive darkness and the characters are, generally, about as dark and bleak as the corpse-strewn airports where the plane briefly lands to be refueled. The show has a pounding, percussive soundtrack that embodies the time-pressure that is omnipresent. For some tastes, the show may be claustrophobically bleak and I can't recommend it to everyone. It's an odd reflection of the refugee crisis that convulsed Europe in the wake of the Syrian War -- here our refugees are middle-class Europeans, forced to flee for their lives and circumnavigating the globe again and again in an exodus that seems, more or less, doomed. Once, European borders (at least in the EU) were all open and people moved freely -- now, the world has darkened; people are confined to a single airplane that orbits the earth in vain looking for a place to land but not stay.
Space Force is a much sunnier show and a throwback to classic models in the genre of TV comedy. The program is mildly satiric, taking potshots at Donald Trump's idea of a forming a "Space Force" -- POTUS has tweeted that there will be "boobs on the moon by 2024" -- this is interpreted as "boots on the moon." Steve Carell plays four-star general Mark Naird, the leader of the Space Force operation that is hidden in a secret base at a place called Wild Horse, Colorado. Naird's sidekick is Dr. Adrian Mallory, a brilliant scientist as well as a witty curmudgeon played by John Malkovich. The casting of Carrell and Malkovich as an "odd couple" required to work cooperatively is brilliant and two actors have radically different performance styles that somehow mesh in an appealing fashion. The show has elements of the family comedy -- Naird has a rebellious and lonely daughter who hates being trapped in the deserts of Colorado and his wife, played by Lisa Kudrow, is inexplicably imprisoned at a Maximum Security Jail doing a 40 year sentence for some crime that is never specified at all. (In the show's first scene she is free, but, before Naird is assigned to the Space Force operation, something happens and she ends up in prison.) Comedy of this kind requires a deep cast of supporting characters to keep things lively -- Space Force features a cynical PR man, "Fuck Tony" as they call him, who is like a character from Veep; there is a sexy and highly competent Black female helicopter pilot who yearss to be an astronaut, various nationalities of scientists working on the space program led by Chan, a Chinese-American, also a main and recurring character. Naird, who isn't too smart but seems to be well-meaning, has an even dimmer witted adjutant and is pestered by an obsequious and conniving Russian "partner" who tries to gather information by dating the General's teenage daughter. POTUS and FLOTUS are off-screen presences who sow chaos and discord through their tweets. General Naird's daughter also has an Alabama suitor on the Base who is a bit like Gomer Pyle. Carter Burwell has composed an incongruously heroic and stirring score for the show which also features sixties hits like 'Kokomo" by the Beach Boys and "Daydream Believer" (is this by the Monkees?). The show is sometimes quite funny but it's heart really lies in the relationships between the characters, some of which are poignant and, even, tragic. One subplot involves Naird's attempt to have a conjugal visit with his wife at the penitentiary -- this keeps getting delayed and, at one point, POTUS refuses to authorize the encounter because he is unjustly angry with Naird over something. When the conjugal visit occurs, it's not very satisfactory -- Naird's wife, who may be in a lesbian relationship in the prison, asks for an "open marriage" and the zipper on her orange jumpsuit doesn't work right. Other characters struggle with loneliness -- when Naird's daughter invites her classmates over for a party, no one comes and she is stuck with twenty pizzas. Although there is a broad story arc, each of the ten episodes (they are about thirty minutes long) poses some kind of problem or challenge, often importing a guest star for the individual show, that must be solved or resolved before the end of the program.
The film reminds me of the old Andy of Mayberry show -- the main character, here Naird, is unprepossessing and sometimes seems not too smart, but he has a good heart and is an attractive figure who tries to do his best in difficult circumstances. Naird is surrounded by fools and opportunists but, even, they can sometimes be recruited to help him and, although some of these people are stupid, they are, at least, loyal. (There are aspects of many different popular TV comedies in Space Force -- the blowhard generals and bureaucrats are a bit like Ted Baxter on The Mary Tyler Moore Show. The dry humor that is associated with Malkovich's character is similar to the way Kelsey Grammar played Frasier on that show, and, in fact, Frasier was a variant on the character that Bob Newhart developed in his old show.)
The TV comedy that Space Force most explicitly does not resemble is Seinfeld. Seinfeld established the pattern for cynical comedy in which the characters are generally self-absorbed, narcissistic and, even, casually vicious. (Seinfeld morphed into the extreme, disheartening misanthropy of Veep, a show that was quite funny, but very nasty and sometimes tediously offensive.) Space Force is a didactic comedy of the kind that ruled the airwaves in the early 60's. All of these shows were derived from the Andy Griffith model and Dick van Dyk's show. In each episode, a quandary arises that must be solved by the characters -- generally, the resolution to the problem involved cooperation, putting aside hostility, fair play, and, even, a kind of rough justice. Characters who were cruel or vain were punished -- their bloated pretenses were punctured. Each show taught a little lesson to its viewers in compassion or empathy or, even, justice. Space Force follows this pattern -- the characters, although comically flawed, must work together cooperatively to achieve heroic ends that are signaled without irony by Burwell's soaring score. Values of loyalty and teamwork are emphasized. Furthermore, we see an ethnically diverse group of people laboring to achieve an important common objective. Space Force can be cloying, but the presence of Malkovich as the cynical scientist, seems designed to keep the sentiment in check. The show is familiar to me because its tropes date back to my childhood and before and, therefore, I like it. Whether it will appeal to broader audiences is unclear to me.
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