Settlers Review: A Pessimistic Sci-Fi Yarn About the Limitations of Human Nature

Settlers allows for weighty themes to play out inside a cramped domestic setting, wary of easy answers or moral platitudes.

Settlers
Photo: IFC Midnight

Halfway through writer-director Wyatt Rockefeller’s Settlers, Remmy (Brooklynn Prince) decides to run away from the homestead on Mars where she’s spent all 10 years of her life. She’s just witnessed her mother, Ilsa (Sofia Boutella), succumb after a month of resistance to the advances of Jerry (Ismael Cruz Cordova), the man who killed her husband, Reza (Jonny Lee Miller), in a struggle to control the homestead. When their backs are turned, Remmy slips away into the barren red mesas that the film’s opening shots have presented as a sweeping, boundless expanse full of untapped potential.

Remmy has barely scaled the first ridge, though, when she runs into a translucent barrier: the side of a glass dome that encloses the homestead. In the space of a moment, her sense of the world contracts, from what was once the whole of Mars to a couple square miles of tinned air. “Hard to miss, isn’t it? Once you know it’s there,” Jerry later says to Remmy, after saving her from the tunnel leading out of the dome, where she nearly dies of asphyxiation. Fittingly, then, this grim neo-western’s second half is defined by an oppressive claustrophobia. Beyond the dome, Mars is effectively uninhabitable. The homestead, and the three people living there now, are all that remain of a failed attempt to colonize the planet.

Settlers is built on such moments, which rip the rug out from under the characters and, by extension, the audience. Where a typical sci-fi or western film appeals to the impulse to reach out toward the unknown—an impulse hardly inimical to colonization—so as to expand our concept of the possible, Settlers repeatedly, savagely, punctures the balloons of our faith in the future. Remmy’s parents imply early on in the film that no whales, elephants, or owls remain back on Earth. Only dogs. “Earth isn’t what it once was,” Reza says.

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Rockefeller turns genre against itself to weave a pessimistic yarn about the limitations imposed on us by our own nature—specifically a tendency toward violence and domination that’s apparently stowed away in our reptile brains. Settlers is the rare sci-fi film with no special effects, aliens, or outlandish technology to speak of. At the same time, its draws power precisely from its limitations, trusting in the viewer’s imagination—the very object of its critique—as opposed to empty spectacle, an approach which places it in the company of scrappy low-budget sci-fi outings like Zeek Earl and Chris Caldwell’s Prospect.

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In this way, Settlers allows for weighty themes to play out inside a cramped domestic setting, wary of easy answers or moral platitudes. Even though Jerry is responsible for killing Reza, it turns out that he’s only retaking his childhood home. Moreover, as Ilsa and Remmy begrudgingly rely on him for their continued survival, he becomes almost a surrogate husband and father. He even promises to lay his gun down and turn his back after 30 days, presenting Ilsa with the opportunity to exact her revenge if he hasn’t earned her trust by then. But it’s not so simple, and after a disastrous turn of events, the film leaps forward in time to when Remmy (now played by Nell Tiger Free) is in her late teens. As far as they know, she and Jerry are the only people left on Mars, and for a moment, the homestead takes on the trappings of a Garden of Eden—before it’s ruined by a spasm of violence at the film’s climax.

The line between unalloyed nihilism and cautionary tale is tricky to discern here. At a time when certain billionaires are mustering fathomless resources to convince us that we should write-off Earth as a hopeless dump so they can colonize space and multiply their billions there, making a dump of it in the process, Settlers insists space is a merciless vacuum that will not redeem us. But the film also ends up affirming another facet of human nature when the pre-teen Remmy befriends a robot everyone else views as a mere tool, naming it Steve and drawing a smiley face on its boxy carapace, an act of childish anthropomorphism, true, but sympathy and imagination also, that turns out to have critical ramifications in the end.

Score: 
 Cast: Sofia Boutella, Ismael Cruz Cordova, Brooklynn Prince, Nell Tiger Free, Jonny Lee Miller  Director: Wyatt Rockefeller  Screenwriter: Wyatt Rockefeller  Distributor: IFC Midnight  Running Time: 104 min  Rating: NR  Year: 2021  Buy: Video

William Repass

William Repass’s poetry and fiction have appeared in Bennington Review, Denver Quarterly, Fiction International, Bending Genres, and elsewhere. For links to his published writing, click here.

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