Another Earth Was on Tonight!
Well tonight I found another movie called Another Earth. I had not heard of this movie when I started watching it. I simply picked it off the TV Guide because of the category of sci-fi, and the description helped out a little bit talking about two earths. That said, I’m not all that picky about what I watch most of the time anyway, so it’s no surprise that I went into this one blind.
Rhoda Williams, who is played by Brit Marling, is a 17-year-old teenager that has just been accepted to MIT. She has her whole life laid out front of her, and everything up to this point in her life is going her way. This was about to change: when she goes out with friends to celebrate, driving home drunk, she gets news from the radio that a planet just like Earth has been spotted and can be seen by the naked eye.
While looking out the car window trying to get a glimpse of this new approaching planet, she swerves into the oncoming lane and plows head-in to John Burroughs, played by William Mapother, killing his wife, his infant son, his unborn daughter, and placing him in a coma. Because she was a 17-year-old juvenile, the records were sealed, and he never was able to identify the driver.
Four years later, feeling guilty, and just released from serving a four-year prison sentence, she seeks out to visit John with the intentions of apologizing. She chickens out, comes up with an excuse to clean up his house, and lives day to day trying to do what little she can for him to give them a better life. This backfires, and they fall in love. When Rhoda wins an essay contest to be trained to visit Earth2, this forces her to come clean. The truth destroys John, and her guilt brings her to give him her ticket to visit Earth2 to in hopes that his family is still alive.
This is a very interesting story about parallel worlds that are exact mirrors of each other until such time that they discover each other exists, and there timelines split. Several times throughout the movie things seem to lag along. Overall, the story is more about the relationship of Rhoda and John and less about the impending trip to Earth2, and for these reasons I give this story a 6 out of 10.
