If the embed above misbehaves, the trailer is also on YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OfDKqPL0jPM
In most astronaut films, space is the thing trying to kill you. Above the Below, whose trailer has just surfaced ahead of a 4 December opening in US cinemas, takes the view that space was merely the warm-up act. Three astronauts survive a catastrophic re-entry, come down well off course, and then discover that their capsule has no intention of bobbing about politely waiting for the recovery helicopter. Down it goes, into the crushing dark, with no contact with mission control and the oxygen gauge heading in only one direction. Think Apollo 13, with the happy splashdown swapped for the third act of DeepStar Six.
It is a less daft premise than it sounds. In July 1961, Gus Grissom’s Mercury capsule, Liberty Bell 7, lost its hatch moments after splashdown, filled with seawater and sank, while America’s second man in space very nearly drowned as his suit took on water. The capsule then sat on the floor of the Atlantic, some three miles down, until a salvage team hauled it up in 1999. NASA has spent the six decades since designing spacecraft that float. Hollywood, being Hollywood, has spent a couple of years imagining one that doesn’t.
Idris Elba plays mission commander Jackson, with Caitlin FitzGerald (Masters of Sex) as co-pilot Brooks and Hero Fiennes Tiffin, who was the eleven-year-old Tom Riddle in Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince, as Rhodes. The official logline promises an unthinkable choice over who risks everything trying to reach the surface and who stays behind with the wreckage. Three people, one sinking tin can and not enough air to go round is a sum genre readers have been doing since Tom Godwin’s ‘The Cold Equations’ in 1954. This is essentially that story with added brine and a much bigger catering budget.
Elba co-directs with Martin Owen, whose original idea it was. Owen says the concept arrived in a dream in which he fell through space, tumbled towards the sea and sank into the darkness, which is either the stuff of cinema or a strong argument against cheese before bed. His previous films include the video-game romp The Intergalactic Adventures of Max Cloud and the comedy-horror The Loneliest Boy in the World, while Elba’s only previous feature as director was 2018’s Yardie. The film is a British production, shot at Pinewood between late 2023 and early 2024, and the makers did things the hard way: they built the spacecraft and then sank it in the studio’s underwater tank. Elba has joked that he is looking forward to showing audiences he can hold his breath for four minutes, which is the sort of skill you do not get to put on a CV very often.
Elba, of course, has form with doomed spacecraft. He was Captain Janek in Prometheus, the man who spent part of that ill-fated mission putting up a little Christmas tree on the bridge, and here he is again, in a December release, having another dreadful time in a spaceship. Somebody at Lionsgate clearly has a sense of humour, or simply a calendar.
Not everything here is quite so restrained. The trailer’s accompanying blurb promises a story about what we do when faced with the “greatest stakes imaginable”, a phrase that rather overlooks the entire back catalogue of Doctor Who, every Warhammer 40,000 novel ever printed and most of Michael Moorcock. It has also taken nearly three years to get from its 2023 sales launch at the American Film Market to a cinema near anyone, which is a long time to keep three astronauts underwater. The good news is that the finished film reportedly comes in at under 90 minutes, which in an age of three-hour superhero sagas feels like a genuine act of mercy, and possibly the only sensible approach to a film in which the air is running out.
Back in 1965, International Rescue would have had Thunderbird 4 down there before the opening titles finished rolling. Jackson, Brooks and Rhodes have no such luck, which is rather the point. Here at SFcrowsnest, we will be watching the oxygen counter as closely as the crew, and quietly checking whether the hatch on our own sofa is properly sealed.
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