Working
on a Generation Starship is nothing like being a Pullman Car porter. It is
about as dead end as you can get. By its nature, it implies expendability.
While the future of humanity slumbers in suspended animation, someone has to
keep the maintenance up, but it probably won’t be mankind’s best and brightest.
Facing a crisis, the Tantalus’s two-man skeleton crew choses to revive a
technical specialist to manage the repairs. At least that’s their story, but it
is not necessarily the truth, as Alex Talabot soon suspects in Javier Chillon’s
Spanish-produced, English language short film They Will All Die in Space (trailer here), which screens
during the 2016 Sanford International Film Festival.
Apparently,
the Tantalus has been damaged by a freak interstellar collision and is now
drifting helplessly in space. Atenas and Eberhart wake Talabot, hoping he can
repair the navigation and power systems. Such work would be even better suited
to his wife’s skill set, but Talabot heeds their cautions against awakening her—and
he will be glad he did.
As
he proceeds to mend the damaged ship to the best of his abilities, Talabot
discovers an alarming number of weirdly kit-bashed quick fixes to the system. They
are not the sort of cheap patches he would expect in a ship meant to last for
generations. He also grows increasingly alarmed by the suspicious behavior of
Atenas and Eberhart.
TWADIS is very impressive
on a technical level, combining production designer Idoia Esteban’s gritty, lived-in,
Millennium Falcon-esque sets and trappings with Luis Fuentes’ super-stylish
black-and-white cinematography. However, as a narrative, it feels more like a
condensed episode of a greater narrative than a discrete and self-contained
arc. Still, if it is a proof-of-concept short, it should be jolly darned persuasive.
