Even at the end of the film, it’s unclear why she remains sane and stable as everyone around her spirals. This vagueness might work for a more removed character, but she is essentially the only person given much screen time. Like everyone else on the ship, she is given no back story, leaving her motivations and actions throughout the film often inexplicable. Over the course of the Aniara’s journey, Mimaroben becomes the ship’s naive martyr as both the politics and collective mental state of the passengers continue to devolve with each successive year in space.Īs the main narrative conduit of the film, Mimaroben is a heroine of little depth beyond an inexplicable optimism that Everything Will Be All Right. Though somehow involved in every aspect of life on the Aniara, she mainly serves as a steward for the Mima, a semi-sentient robotic being that puts humans in trances to experience images of what Earth used to be. It also fails in adding anything new to the story in its adaptation, making for a film that’s flat overall.īeginning at the moment of the Aniara’s involuntary departure from its set course, the film focuses on Mimaroben (Emelie Jonsson), an employee on the ship. Its fragmented vision of the Aniara and its doomed fate makes for a shallow attempt at high-concept sci-fi that is out of its depth when tackling the source material’s commentary on the human condition. “Aniara,” the latest release from directors Pella Kågerman and Hugo Lilja, is an ambitious project in interpreting this behemoth work on film that ultimately loses sight of the poem’s intricacies and artistic vision along the way of adaptation. Adrift in the cosmos, the ship is described by Martinson as a manifestation of human existential crisis in the face of the abyss: “The monumental foolishness of living is thus made obvious to one and all / who’d spent years hunting for one crevice giving / access for a gleam of hope to fall.” Across 103 cantos, it details the tragic fate of the Aniara, a ship filled with human colonists bound for Mars that is irrevocably pulled off course.

Harry Martinson’s 1956 poem “Aniara” is a sweeping epic.

Aniara poem