Fantasia 2024: ESCAPE ATTEMPT, Short Film Short Review

In the future Saul hitches a ride with Anna and Vadim, a young couple on their way off planet for a vacation. Saul requests that they simply drop him off at the nearest uninhabited planet. He says he's done with human nature, and people. When they touch down they discover a handful of bodies outside their ship, frozen to death. This planet is inhabited and a large number of the humanoids here are being held against their will. 

 

Daniel Shapiro and Alex Topaller's sci-fi short film, Escape Attempt, is based on the 1962 novel of the same name by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky. Yep, the Russian authors who wrote the screenplay for Andrei Tarkovsky's film Stalker, based on their novel Roadside Picnic. 

 

Their foray into long form has cool production values, design and the visual effects are world class. But that is to be expected by filmmakers who have made their living creating commercials and music videos. Effects were done by their own company Aggressive, along with Juice, Root VFX, Digital Access, Orka, and Battleship VFX Ltd. It takes a digital village.

 

It is one thing to make something look pretty. Surround yourself with the right people and anything is possible. It is another thing to make a statement beneath the gloss and Shapiro and Topaller's statement is a sobering one. When we got press info about this short the other week this was in the release, “At the film’s core lies a fundamental question about history and the nature of humanity: is change possible? Can humans shift the way they behave, or are we forever condemned to re-enact past tragedies?”. 

 

Past tragedies. Remember that if ever you're able to watch Escape Attempt because this future has connections to the past, in more ways than one. What’s really interesting here is though there are similarities with events in humanity’s and Saul’s past, the allegory is unmissable here, this trio encounter a completely separate humanoid culture with no connections to our own. 

 

The production values and craftsmanship will impress you, the message should impress upon you as well.