Project Ithaca is a 2019 science fiction film about a group of strangers who awaken aboard an alien spacecraft and must depend on each other to survive.
Part of any successful sci-fi thriller is its ability to build a sense of discovery, to create a place that invites exploration for its audience to poke around and want to learn more. Why are we here? Who is behind it? What does it mean? Some of the best at this weave what we understand to be true about the story with a greater feeling of ambiguity, lending it a certain timelessness. With director Nicholas Humphries‘s latest independent film Project Ithaca, there are plenty of questions at play and a genuine hook, but even with some surprising production design and a cast that works hard to convince, it can’t harness the wonder a project like this demands, leaving this a mostly static experience.
In 1959, deep with the Raven Rock Mountain Complex, a top secret facility, something strange is going on. The government has gotten their hands on that fallen alien spacecraft in Roswell, finding inside a dead creature and a host of worry. In the aftermath, they discovered that an unborn child in town showed curious abnormalities and as such, took her to this underground compound where she, over the next twelve years, developed extraordinary telekinetic abilities, eventually able to make contact with the alien species. That turns out to be a bad idea as the story shifts to the belly of an enormous spacecraft where a small group of people are trapped in a creepily organic chamber, forced to find out how they got there and why a snake-like monster keeps coming to attack them.
The first third of Project Ithaca is almost entirely indecipherable, purposefully so, as we see things that don’t make sense and words that don’t help all that much in making it clear. It’s not that this confusion is bad, plenty of movies start this way, but there is a feeling that it’s going off the rails the further it leads us into the mystery, the dots needed to be connected spreading further apart rather than closing in. By the time we end up in a claustrophobic gooey mess of a room with its kidnapped occupants, we’re already beginning to lose interest, which is too bad because it’s here where we should have started.
The setup is in fact compelling, these diverse people all from different time periods and here for specific reasons. Learning about who they are and why they are here makes for some good ideas, the involvement of the aliens and how they interact laid out with good intentions. Unfortunately, the movie never really gets a hold of you, spending a lot of time in exposition and dialogue, never building any momentum for its (hopeful) epic finale. There are some jarring moments of graphic horror that are effective, but in combination with old tricks from other similar movies and a general malaise about it all, they don’t elevate as they might. It’s sort of frustrating because there are times when you just want this to shake you and become, well, thrilling.
There are boundless opportunities struggling to make headway with Project Ithaca, the potential on hand almost palpable. Humphries deserves credit for the film’s convincing production design, given the limitations of his budget, and there is no blame on the cast, most of whom find the right tone. However, despite the message it works for, the often inaccessible plotting and leisurely pace temper investment, not to mention the larger absence of curiosity, having this aim high but land short.