The Dark Parade

Hey there everyone, welcome to a new episode of The Dark Parade. My name is Bo, and I'm a found footage fool.

Tell me the camera thing isn't annoying. Yeah, it's annoying. All right, folks, so we have had a fairly good run of things of late.

And this one is going to be a little bit different in that you can argue that this is not necessarily a horror movie, but it falls into the found footage category squarely.

And it's got horror elements, so we're going to go with it. Of course, I am talking about the movie Europa Report from the year of our Lord 2013.

And the brief sweep of what this movie is about is it's directed by a guy named Sebastian Cordero.

uh, who is best known for this and a bunch of other, uh, Spanish movies. Um, like, uh, Pescador, which I think is something about fish.

And Sin Muertos No Hay Carnival, which I think means with death we don't have a carnival. At any rate, it was also written by Philip Jalat.

or Gilot, uh, who has, uh, who wrote the spine of night, uh, and, and wrote some video games, including some of the tomb Raider games and that kind of thing. So, um, pretty good writer, I think.

But Europa Report is about a team of astronauts sent to Europa, the moon of Jupiter. That's right, right?

moon of jupiter anyway sent to the europa to see if there's life there that they kind of suspect hey there's life under the ice of europa because of all these heat vents and so forth and so we're gonna send

are folks there to see what's what. And it is, uh, it has a pretty good cast with, uh, Charlto, Charlto Copley from, uh, district nine.

As one of the leads, as well as Michael Ingvist, you've got yourself a little bit of Mbeth Davids showing up in there. There is Dan Fogler.

Daniel Wu, Anna Maria Marinka. Anyway, pretty good cast. And they go to Europa. It turns out that there is not just something below the ice. There is something...

very much alive and kind of deadly. And, you know, also there's some business with losing members of the crew along the way.

But we're not here to judge the relative and subjective quality of this movie. Oh, no, no, no. If you are a listener to Found Footage Fool, you will know that we have a very specific set of five criteria that we will use.

to ensure that we appropriately weigh the heart of this movie, much like Amit, and decide whether or not it's a successful found footage movie.

So the first of our criteria is keeping the camera on. Does it make sense in this movie to have the footage that we have found? And that is very much the case because this is...

You know, it's a recorded log of the events of this mission. So it's a lot of, you know, here are the cameras on the ship. Here are the cameras in the ship. Here are some personal journals that are being recorded by the crew.

as well as some interview footage mixed in between with some of the upper management of the mission of this expedition. So, yeah, totally makes sense that we would have the footage that we have. And...

You know, without getting into the authenticity part, some of that stuff is fairly impressive. You know, like when you're seeing the exterior shots of the ship and that kind of thing looks pretty good. You know, I haven't been to space personally.

but it feels like they kind of captured what that might be like. So then let's get to our second category, with the first being a relatively successful sort of...

effort with keeping the camera on. So let's get to characters. And this is kind of where the problems begin, I think, with this movie, is that...

None of the characters feel terribly well fleshed out. That there's, you know, Charlton Copley's character, you understand like, oh, his kids are back home.

And he sort of regrets being on this mission to some degree, but he's also kind of charismatic and upbeat. And...

You get maybe a little bit with Dr. Unger, the Mbeth Davids character who is back on Earth, as well as Dan Fogler, who is also, you know, one of the higher-ups in the mission. But...

Aside from that, I guess maybe Rosa, who is the Anna Maria Marinka character, gets the most screen time. And she's kind of fine.

Like, I think all the performances are totally fine in this movie. But, you know, like, she seems ambitious, I suppose, would be her...

main characteristic it's just not a movie where you feel like you're rooting for any of the characters you know you're not rooting against them the way that you often do in some of these found footage movies where the characters are terribly irritating

and you just want them to stop with all the talking and the breathing. This is much more like, I don't dislike anybody, but I just don't feel like I've got, other than Sharlto Copley, who...

you know slight spoilers for europa report doesn't make it through the mission and so at a certain point he's just no longer in the movie and the one character that seemed like really engaging and kind of an audience surrogate in a way

just goes away. And that's a real bummer. So for characters, it's a real kind of flatline for every moment where I was kind of rooting for...

uh, Copley's character of James Corrigan, there are moments where I just didn't care at all about what was going on with, uh, the rest of the, the cast. So yeah, it's kind of a, a,

disappointing result there uh which brings us to authenticity does the movie feel authentic is it believable is what you're seeing before your eyes feel like it makes sense in the world that the movie is created

And for sure, in fact, one of the bigger issues I have with the movie is that it gets so bogged down in the sort of routine of here's what it would be like to be on this mission.

You know, oh, we've got some problem landing. Now we've landed. Let's go walk around on the ice a little bit. Let's run our scans. You know, let's... leave these logs for uh you know our kids and people back home and that kind of thing it gets so

caught up in the authenticity part of it. Sometimes I think it forgets to be an entertaining movie. And...

And that is also a bit of a problem. So, yes, is it authentic? 100%. It feels like a very believable representation of what a mission like this is.

this would be up, up to and including the end of the movie, uh, where it gets a little more, you know, monstrous. Um, so yeah, as far as authenticity goes, completely, uh, authentic.

does not mean it's entertaining, unfortunately. So, which brings us to watchability. Is this movie watchable? And, I mean, to call it watchable is underselling. It is a very watchable movie. It's well done.

Like I said, it's well acted. It looks good. The idea of going to another planet and discovering life is incredibly compelling. It's a wonderful idea for a found footage movie.

And far better than Dark Side of the Moon or whatever that film footage movie was that was just trash. We might do that one next just to provide a point of comparison to make me like this one more. But...

Yes, is it watchable for sure? Does that mean it's a great watch? Not really. As much as I hate to say it, I feel like this movie is just kind of dull.

And I don't think it needs to descend into pure monster movie, like something like the movie Life, which deals with encountering alien life or alien for that matter. You know, this is a much more...

measured take on that and that's fine there's nothing wrong with that being the case of presenting this in a way that's a little more realistic and a little more uh believable but

It still just gets to a point, and I think this goes back to the characters not being people that you're really rooting for, that at a certain point you just kind of don't care at what's happening. It's like, okay, well then just show me the monster and let's get done.

Because I don't have any emotional investment in the lives of these characters, so I don't care if they make it or not.

there's a lot of a big part of the last part of the the movie is hey are they gonna make it off of the planet europa or not and at a certain point as i was watching i was like i don't care i don't care if they get off i don't care if they get home

All I want is for this movie to give me the money shot and then wrap it up. And, you know, eventually that happened. But it took it a little too long to get there.

And then our fifth criteria being, you know, a found footage horror movie podcast is what about the scares in this movie? And I don't know that this movie is very frightening unless the idea of life.

outside of the planet earth terrifies you there are some moments that are more 2001-esque than they are like horror movie Where people encounter, you know, we see from a very limited perspective their reaction to, you know, what they are discovering on Europa.

And again, we do finally see this, uh, this creature, but it's not meant for scares really.

I don't know. I find it hard to believe that anybody ever left Europa Report thinking like, oh, that movie was scary. So I don't think that's the case. So...

Where does that leave us, you might ask? Well, I think it leaves us with a real mixed bag. Is the movie well made? Sure. Is it entertaining or scary or...

funny or exciting in very limited capacity. Like I said, I think once Charlton Copley leaves the film, a lot of the life of the movie kind of leaves with him.

And then you're just waiting for the monster part of it, which isn't a significant enough portion of the movie to carry it. So, yeah, I don't know that I would recommend Europa Report.

Not because it's not well done. It's just a little dull. And I think that's where we're going to leave it. We're going to put Europa Report up on the shelf now.

And say, you know, if you found yourself on a Sunday afternoon watching Europa Report, it's a good recipe for a nap. But it's not the worst movie you're ever going to see. And if somebody was a big...

you know, space exploration nerd and thought that, you know, oh, they get it right. Fine. Fine. I could see that argument, but I ain't that guy and I just want the movie to be entertaining.

And it wasn't terribly entertaining. So that is going to do it for this time on Found Footage Fool. Thank you as always for joining me.

Um, we've got more coming up this month. If you are listening, uh, to the dark parade on the regular, uh, we will have a, an episode on Moby Dick coming up very soon. And that's going to be very exciting.

uh with with Duncan McLeish uh you're also gonna get a what you're watching next week um I'm gearing up for June which is all gonna be universal horror movies and uh if you want to catch up on uh past episodes obviously you can

uh, subscribe on the podcast catcher of your choice. And I would certainly appreciate, uh, if you did so as well as rating and reviewing where that is possible, that helps a bunch. Uh, you can also go to youtube.com forward slash Legion podcasts.

where you can see video versions of this podcast, among many, many others. And finally, you can goto LegionPodcasts.com/the-dark-parade

And there you can find every single episode we have done of this program, along with links to the social media channels. Fair warning.

Uh, discord is where I am most active. I'm trying to limit.

uh, Facebook and, and Twitter and all of that stuff to about one visit a day just to check in and make sure I answer any messages. But if you do leave me a message on any of those locations, I will certainly get it.

And I think that will do it for now. We'll be back with another found footage fool, uh, in June, according to my schedule. So, uh, the next couple of Fridays will be what you watching in heart of war.

And, uh, and that'll do it for this time. So as always, thank you very much for listening and thank you as always for joining the dark parade. We'll see you soon.