Humans have destroyed the Earth! It’s time for Plan B … Ok, you have my attention. Plan B is altering human DNA to create fishmen and moving to one of Saturn’s moons … OK, you lost my attention.
Boy, when The Titan gets stupid, it gets stupid in a hurry. But it didn’t get stupid for a full hour, so maybe I’ll concentrate my attention there. It’s 2048 and Earth is becoming unlivable. Yeah, I have no trouble believing that future; this is the natural result of greed, short-sighted policy, and unchecked growth. It’s easy to see this if you’re American; it’s harder to see this if you’re an American addicted to Fox News.
So it’s time to colonize somewhere else to save the human race. That somewhere? The Titan, or as most humans know it, Titan, the largest of Saturn’s moons and the one we can best pretend will host life as we know it. Sure, it’s all ice and rocks and the atmosphere is 97% nitrogen. But hey, we have ice and rocks here – heck, they’re synonyms to fans of hard liquor — and Earth’s atmosphere is 78% nitrogen; that’s really close enough, isn’t it? The idea is we create super soldiers, not unlike the genetic engineering that preceded the Khaaaaaaan episodes of Star Trek, and those dudes go colonize the place for us. Simple, right?
This is where a series of questions needed to be asked, but were not. Questions such as: How are we getting to Titan? Assuming we can withstand the harsh climate, how will we be able to do those things necessary to perpetuate human life that don’t involve being able to swim in ice water? What exactly do you mean by “experiment?” Does everyone have to be an “experiment” in order to move to Titan? How are you going to “experiment” with future generations? And, of course, the most pressing question, “WTF?!”
Anxious to return to the make-up table, Sam Worthington plays the head guinea pig, Lt. Rick Janssen. It is worth note that The Titan promised a dramatic change among the soldiers –that’s pretty much why we’re here—but didn’t exactly say what that change would look like. Perhaps Sam thought he was going to turn into an actual super-Saturn blue Na’vi guinea pig. Hmmm, do you think this guy is a furry?
We’re also promised that the experimentation will involve suffering and not every soldier will take to it. Lt. Janssen seems to be doing fine. He can suddenly stay under water for 40 minutes at a time and then embarrass Michael Phelps for dessert. Gotta say – bottom of a swimming pool for 40 minutes? Pretty sure I’d get bored even if I could take Phelps’ gold away.
And then The Titan starts hinting at stupid – a fellow soldier is having issues with the transformation and turns on everybody. I’m sorry; this can’t be right – you are deliberately turning soldiers into creatures who don’t remember they’re human, let alone soldiers? Explain to me again the plan to populate Titan. Don’t spare the details. How are soldiers who have evolved into non-soldiers supposed to carry out orders? I’m all ears… or earflaps; I’m not sure what we’re “evolving” here.
That was a mere hint. Stupid would come. And when stupid came, it avalanched. It swarmed like a Bieber crowd; it attacked like a Russian troll bot, and it rolled like the boulder at the beginning of Raiders of the Lost Ark. Some questions are better left unanswered and some questions are completely ignored in favor of plots that seem relevant, but completely undermine the premise of the film. I have no idea what The Titan actually wanted to do, but it was a big, fat fail any way you care to splice it.
To capture bottled-up light’ning
A transformation most fright’ning
The army declared
For human lives spared
The plot could use serious Titan-ing
Rated TV-MA, 97 Minutes
Director: Lennart Ruff
Writer: Max Hurwitz
Genre: Our screwed future
Type of being most likely to enjoy this film: The creature from The Shape of Water
Type of being least likely to enjoy this film: Climate Change deniers
