“Compared to the breadth of knowledge yet to be known… what does your life actually matter?”

Justin’s rating: All these worlds are yours except Europa. Attempt no landing there. Whoops.

Justin’s review: When I’ve gone fishing around for solid, under-the-radar scifi movies from the past couple decades, Europa Report seems to pop up more often than not on people’s lists. The only factor that held me back from seeing it before now is that this is in the “found footage” genre, which I’ve not been the biggest fan of ever since two minutes after seeing The Blair Witch Project back in 1999.

The first manned trip to Jupiter’s moons runs into trouble along the way as a solar storm cuts off communication from earth. The premise is that the world had no idea what happened to Europa One for a long time after that… until the sponsoring company received and relayed the final batch of broadcasts intercut with narration by the company’s mission leader and other “historic” footage.

The ship itself looks a lot like modern-day interiors of the International Space Station, which lends a sense of authentic hard scifi. The unexpected isolation from humanity and uncertainty about what lies ahead starts to get to the crew, but the six are professionals and driven to get the job done.

Their target? The moon of Europa, where the goal is to investigate the oceans buried underneath the ice-encrusted surface. It’s not going to be easy, though, as disasters and unexpected discoveries put humanity to the test in the most extreme of environments.

In this sense, Europa Report is kind of like a “dwindling party” horror movie, only here it’s not any malicious alien murderbeast killing off the rather bland crew one by one but the sheer danger of such a far-flung mission. Plus a surprise lurking out in the far dark.

However, there’s also the joy of exploration as humanity lands on a previously unexplored body farther out than we’ve ever gone before. So while there is a pall of failure that hovers over this, there are cracks of hope shining through as well. It made me think of how Star Trek at its best was always about mankind eager to see what was out there, even if it meant a whole lot of red shirts had to pay the price.

Europa Report makes the curious decision to jump around in the timeframe somewhat, which is sort of explained in-universe as the documentarians editing for tension and interest. But this is nothing more than distracting garnish for a somewhat skimpy story that can’t stand on its own.

That’s part of why I feel conflicted about this movie. I wanted to like it for the premise, the wonder of exploration, and a dark and foreboding push into deep space. Yet Europa Report couldn’t bring it home for me. The found footage style doesn’t really lend anything other than another band-aid for a smaller budget, and longer stretches of boring scenes had me sighing with frustration. Eventually the movie does stuff, yes, but it really needed better pacing to shore up these cracks.