Astronaut: The Last Push
I discovered Astronaut: The Last Push while perusing the live TV listings on my DVR. I recorded it because two names were associated with the film: Khary Payton (who I know as the voice of Cyborg in Teen Titans and Teen Titans Go!) and Lance Henriksen. I thought to myself, “this movie has two known actors and a story about space, how can I not watch it?”
The first astronauts slated to visit Jupiter’s moons are Michael Forrest (Khary Payton) and Nathan Miller (James Madio). A private corporation, Moffitt Industries launches a space mission to send these two astronauts to the largest planet in our solar system. When whales are discovered living on Europa, one of Jupiter’s moons, Walter Moffitt (Lance Henriksen) pushes for this mission. In the early part of the mission there is a near catastrophic accident that forces Michael Forrest to make a lonely journey back home to Earth.
It is a good idea for a film and it does well in exploring it. Being alone in space for an extended period would destroy someone’s mental health even if they have delayed communications with Earth.
The movie knows this and while some may find large swaths of the movie boring, this is where I find that the movie is doing its job perfectly. Writer and director Eric Hayden captures what it feels like being trapped in a tiny capsule floating alone through empty space.
Khary Payton does great work in this film as he struggles with his sanity while being trapped alone. He is stuck beyond hope but brings that across wonderfully through his performance. What changed visually throughout the short runtime was something I appreciated about this film. Most noticeable as Michael descends into madness; shots become framed askew which is completely different from when the film opens with perfectly framed shots. Also, color grading changes becomes yellowish and overblown.
It is interesting that they decided to do the space mission as private industry instead of government agency. This allowed for the spacecraft to be a bit dodgy because of cost. If NASA built this spacecraft it would have had redundancy on top of redundancy with an extra slice of redundancy to avoid situations like the one presented in the movie. The spacecraft that Michael is stuck on feels like it was built with minimizing costs in mind.
This was obviously a smaller budget independent film, but there were some standout moments and visuals in the film. The Venus flyby impressed me and I thought they did great things visually with that whole sequence. It was just as amazing for me as it was for Michael.
Movies have trouble shocking me. Astronaut: The Last Push did that with its ending though; it was surprising and fitting. This is not the best film ever made but if you have some free time on your hands this weekend or whatever then give it a watch. Some parts of the movie are slow, tedious and boring. That’s done on purpose to convey Michael’s feelings. But overall once again if you are patient enough to sit through those scenes which I do admit were pretty long at times especially towards the end when everything starts going downhill really fast so yea if you can sit through all of that then I think it’s worth seeing.
There’s a few sketchy things in the movie. First off whoever made that graphic to show the flight path of the spacecraft didn’t take physics into account because it’s way off like guys come on. Also those slingshots they keep describing? Yea they’re basically just small detours. Second of all why is Michael’s hair still looking so fresh after three years in space?
So anyway Michael ends up ejecting the re-entry pod with Nathan’s body inside because Moffitt wanted him to have a proper burial or whatever right? So yea basically now Michael can never return from Jupiter he can’t even enter Europa’s atmosphere so rip sorry batcha bud! From this I gather while he is smiling near at the end there and acting normal, Michael has lost his mind. His hallucinations both visually and audibly reflected this quite clearly in fact during later half of the film but different points seemed to recover.
What I think caused Michael to carry out his plan top continue onto Jupiter was seeing Venus. It wasn’t seeing of Venus that caused it, rather it was being in the re-entry capsule with Nathan’s body that caused him to mentally break down.
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